


The Hunt

by Seiya234



Series: Transcendence AU [11]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence, Gen, Transcendence AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-25
Updated: 2016-12-04
Packaged: 2018-04-06 01:29:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 26,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4202781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seiya234/pseuds/Seiya234
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Whereupon Dipper is worried about his brother in law, Mabel is worried about her husband, and Henry Pines thinks he has it all under control until he doesn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Sebastian Ekelhaft was a procurer.  
  
Or perhaps, procurer with a capital P.   
  
Yes, Procurer, that was better.  
  
The point was, he had special skills-the Sight, select contacts, a fast car- which aided him in his career.  
  
Others in his field had warned him away from Gravity Falls, saying that scouting there was certain death.  
  
But Sebastian was the best.  
  
And, he had thought with disgust as he got some coffee, this shithole town had been blown completely out of proportion.  
  
He sat down at a table outside of the little coffee shop, and pretended to read a newspaper even as he scanned the people around him, looking, watching.  
  
Trying to find what he came here for.  
  
He turned a page.   
  
His clients wanted a hunt that they would never forget, and for that they needed game, rare or of benefit to the hunter or preferably both. And surely the place where the Transcendence took place would be the perfect place for Sebastian to scout.  
  
But the few possibilities he had seen while here-a young naga girl, a cervitaur in his first molt, a banshee-would be near impossible to take. Tolerance was good and all, Sebastian thought distastefully, but all it meant for him here was that people would actually give a shit if these creatures, these _things_ that were claimed as friends and family, went missing.  
  
Honestly, as soon as he finished his coffee he was going to check out of his hotel and move on to the next town.  
  
Gravity Falls? In his mind, where Sebastian permitted himself to be a little crass, a little less suave, he snorted. More like Gravity Fails.  
  
"Can I have a latte please?"  
  
Something in the timbre of the man's voice made Sebastian look up, his gaze hidden by the sunglasses perched on his nose.  
  
Nothing could hide the way his jaw dropped however.  
  
The man at the counter, even to normal eyes, probably stuck out like a sore thumb. He was easily over six and a half feet, crowned with bright red curly hair. His clothes-a flannel shirt, blue jeans, and work boots-were all worn but obviously well taken care of. The man turned his head and Sebastian saw that he wore dark rimmed glasses, those sitting on top of a large beaky nose.  
  
That wasn't what had caught Sebastian's attention however.  
  
Unseen by everyone else around them, were a pair of massive antlers spiraling out of his head.  
  
But antlers didn't quite describe them, no mere spirals of keratin here. They were bone...no, wood...no, impossibly both, and they branched out far and wide like the limbs of a tree. Dozens of red juicy apples hung from the branches (or was it bloody hands no it was apples.) A blossom or two still remained, so fragrant that Sebastian could smell it a table away.  
  
What _was_ this man? He wasn't a dryad, otherwise he would be more treelike in his outward appearance, not to mention near an actual tree. And there was something else about him that Sebastian couldn't put his finger on, something that made his blood run cold.  
  
He sipped his coffee to hide the slight smile on his lips.  
  
Well, perhaps this trip hadn't been a complete waste of time at all. Time to make preparations.

\---------------

Henry felt a tingle at his spine, as his eyes absently traced across the café, but he ignored it, something he had gotten good at this past year.

He got into the truck and after two or three tries, managed to get the engine to turn over and the vehicle to start. He pulled onto the highway to Bend, needing to pick up some ILL books from the library there, and quickly lost himself in thought. 

It had been about a year (eleven months, six days) since he had found his daughter getting drowned in a kiddie pool in a trailer.

A year since he had made a Deal, capital D fully intended, with his brother-in-law. And yes, there had been _some_ changes but he had it under control, well and truly!

But in the privacy of the cab of his truck, Henry could admit to himself that…this wasn’t quite the truth.

He had changed, permanently, a hundred little things that added up to make one truth that he couldn’t out run.

He ate almost as much as Hank now, though Hank as a teenage boy still outpaced him. Henry had no idea why his appetite had increased, or where all this energy he was burning was going. (Burning was the right word to use; he hadn’t gained weight but in fact had lost a pound or two. Mabel poked him in the tummy and asked if there was a black hole there.)

There had been seventeen people in the room when he had rescued Willow, seventeen pairs of hands he had collected. And now he could shuffle cards with one hands, finely dice vegetables to a degree he had never been able to master, snap (he had never learned), juggle oranges and apples in the morning…so many neat tricks that the kids and Mabel loved, and even Stan grinned at. 

Tricks that had bled into him from the hands he had taken, and he lay awake at night wondering what else would pass over from those hands into him, what other traits would be transplanted into his personality. 

He was stronger now. Nothing out of the ordinary of course, and certainly nothing that would make others notice.  But _he_ noticed. He didn’t have trouble picking Mabel up now (she was deceptively dense for someone her height.) Lids that he once had Dipper get Henry now opened with ease. And last week he had been helping Stan move some shelves in the Library, and the old man had been looking at him funny all afternoon, and too late Henry realized he was moving shelves by himself that used to take him and another person helping to even budge.

Some days he sat almost paralyzed on the couch for hours, terrified of what this new strength in his muscle, in his bone, could do to others.

He was hyper aware now of the presence of his family. Even if Dipper wasn’t visible yet, Henry could feel him blip onto this plane now within a five hundred yard radius. Henry could close his eyes and know without knowing that Mabel was sleeping in the next room over, that Acacia was climbing ever higher up a tree in the forest, and Stan was almost home, his car eating the road underneath its tires. It had taken him a month to train himself to resist the urge at work to call Mabel or Stan or the kids’ school to see if everything was okay, if they were alright.

(He didn’t want to think about what he would do if they weren’t.)

More and more of his free time was spent in the newly erected garden, in an attempt to try and relax, and control the new….aspects of him, of his personality that he seemed to have gained. Digging his hands into the soil calmed him down, grounded him for lack of a less groan worthy term. He had only been working on it for less than a year and already they had tomatoes and peppers ripening on the vines. Henry tried his best to ignore that they were larger than they should be. Or the way the tendrils of the vines would try and curl around his fingers.

And yet, his family wasn’t completely fooled, despite his best efforts. He caught the way Willow looked at him from the corner of his eyes, a sad drowning look on her face that he had put there, no matter how good his intentions were. None of this had been Willow’s fault, but even so, he could tell that she had taken the blame for this entire situation on to her shoulders.

(When he thought about why that was, he felt his arm tingle, a reminder that everything could be fixed if he would just give in and chop-)

Mabel was worried about him. She tried her best to hide it from him, probably because she was worried he would think less of her if he realized that she was worried and a tad bit scared. He wouldn’t of course, he never could, never would. But that didn’t change the worry that he saw weighing heavily on Mabel’s shoulders when she thought he couldn’t notice.  He had changed, and she noticed, and she was scared, and worse of all, was mad at herself for being scared.  And once again there didn’t seem to be a damn thing he could do about it.

There were some days he could feel his control begin to slip, could feel wood and bone calling from under his skin, begging to burst free. Days where he would look down at his hand and for a second see the head of an axe rather than fingers and a palm. Days where he had to take a deep breath and try his best to ignore the sudden weight he felt coming from his head, days where he tried not to look at his shadow.

He did a lot of fishing by himself these days.

Henry breathed in, breathed out.

He had this under control though. There was no need for the Woodsman to come out again, no need to let himself slip from the leash he had fastened around himself. He just had to keep calm, and ignore the call of wood and earth he constantly felt from within. Hell maybe this would even fade away with the increasing passage of time from the incident…

With a start he realized that he was at the library in Bend.

And that he had almost wrenched the steering wheel off its axle.

Henry looked in horror at his hands, and then thumped his head several times on the wheel.

Then he gathered the books and himself, and went inside the building, because no matter what, he had a job to do, and no time to feel sorry for himself.


	2. Chapter 2

Sebastian spent the next few days scoping the talent.

His clients were a little upset at first, but once he had assured them that he had found a rare prize indeed, they were mollified, and willing to wait.

Besides, after day two, he already had gotten a handle on the man’s patterns.

Observation, and a quick peek in the mailbox, had revealed that the man’s name was Henry Pines. Once he had that, a few favors called in at some state offices gave him more; parents, grandparents, medical records. None of it revealed any possible reason why the redheaded man would have antlers, though Sebastian was bemused to note that he had a, heh, maiden name. The man’s family gave Sebastian a small amount of concern. His wife was the renowned hunter and supernatural rights activist Mabel Pines, and her uncle, who seemed to live with them, had a rap sheet eight pages long. They even had had a set of triplets, one of whom, the brief glimpse that Sebastian had gotten of her, had the Sight as well.

Pines’ routine was simple enough. He would leave his house by 7:30 every morning in his rickety truck, his children crammed inside, and he dropped them off at school. Then he would stop by the pokey coffee shop that Sebastian had been camped at for over a week now, Perk Up, and get a latte. From there he would go to his job at the Gravity Falls Public Library, and stay there until he was let out at 5 pm. Twice he had gone to the Whole Foods in Bend to pick up groceries, but otherwise he went straight home. A normal, staid routine. Nothing out of the ordinary, just a sad little man living a boring, meaningless existence.

For a brief moment, he thought about leaving this one alone. It wasn’t like they didn’t have enough beings for the Hunt already; Pines was just going to be the icing on the cake.

But someone who was human but at the same time clearly wasn’t would be a rare and intriguing prize indeed. Besides, he knew there were three or four hunters who would kill (heh) for a human head on their wall. Especially if they could somehow coax those antlers into reality after it was mounted.

And because he was in a small town and spent an hour every morning at the coffee shop, he knew that the wife happened to be out of town for the week (as well as whoever ‘Dipper’ was but Sebastian dismissed that out of hand.) The con man was in his eighties, and lucky that he hadn’t broken a hip yet. Sure one of the kids had the Sight, but these days every Tom, Dick, and Harry Saw things, as Sebastian himself was evidence of.

That Henry Pines _had_ a family was a massive risk indeed, but one thing he had found in his investigation was that he had a poor relationship with his parents. Sebastian was sure with a little time and even littler money he could spin something out of that. Or hell, maybe he’d even leave it be. It was a crazier world now than the one that he and many others had grown up in. Shit happened.

Sebastian made up his mind. Henry Pines would be his final choice.

Now to plan for extraction.

\------

The phone picked up and his wife’s voice answered on the other end.

“HENRY!”

He winced, and held the phone slightly further away from his ear, but he still smiled to hear Mabel.

He kicked off his work shoes by the door, hearing the kids thump around upstairs. “Hey honey. How’s the trip going?”

Mabel had been out of town the past three days on a trip across the state of Washington and would be for another four. She had been invited to speak at conventions in Spokane, Yakima, and Seattle; Dipper had gone with her because they were going to do some ‘investigating’ in between stops.

“Um….”

Henry slipped off his glasses and pinched his nose.

“What happened?”

“It wasn’t my fault!”

Henry sat down heavily on the couch; this was a conversation that would probably be better held sitting down.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Oh yeah, totally mcshmoatally!”

Henry took a deep breath and waited.

Mabel, bless her, broke in twenty seconds.

“Um, so me and Dipper, well really me because you know, _Dipper_ , but yeah I um…maybebannedfromSpokane?”

He counted to five, remembered how much he loved his wife, and took solace in the fact that it didn’t _sound_ like she was calling from prison before going on.

“What happened?”

She blew out a breath and he could just see her, hand tangled in the cord of the old fashioned phone, sitting on the stiff bed of her cheap motel room.

“ _Wellll_ um one minute I was giving my keynote speech about responsible summoning and then some dude from the local New Canaan Methodist Church started yelling at me and I thought of y-, I got really mad and I started yelling back, whichI _know_ is bad and I’m sorry and-“

Mabel paused to suck in a breath of air, a whistling noise he could hear even over the phone, and then she went on.

“And then things got a little crazy and then everyone started arguing and then we spilled out into the next room-“

“Hey Mabel, sorry to interrupt but where was Dipper?”

“Oh there was a fancy cheese shop in town. I gave him a few drops of blood to make sure he could stay physical for awhile and eat all the cheese he wanted. He didn’t come until the fire started.”

Henry, who had been taking a sip from the tea that Acacia had brought him, choked on the liquid.

“ _Fire?”_

“Oh yeah!” Mabel said far too cheerfully. “The room we landed in there was where they were holding a fire spell demo, and someone grabbed a chair and lit it on fire and um….well, things got blurry from there, but eventually half of the convention center was on fire and I ended up helping people evacuate.”

Henry’s heart raced in his chest. Willow popped in, opened her mouth to say something, saw the phone, and backed out again.

“What happened next?” he asked in a voice that hopefully wasn’t too obviously strangled.

“Dipdops came to see what was up, and he freaked out because he thought I was in trouble and then the other half of the center fell down, but we can’t be _entirely_ sure that was because of Dipper, I mean, that was like, a _really_ hot fire and-“

“Are you in any legal trouble?” he finally asked.

“It was pretty touch and go,” Mabel admitted, “but I talked at them for forty minutes and it wasn’t _entirely_ my fault and I think Dipper was there making faces at them so they let me go, but um. Yeah. Not allowed in Spokane anymore.”

Henry laughed, because what else could he do? At the end of the day, this was who his wife was, what she did, the life she led. At least he didn’t have to bail her out.

“Sorry Henry,” she said a little shamefully on the other end of the line.

“Just don’t raze Yakima to the ground okay?”

“ _Henry!_ ” But there was a laugh in her voice even as she yelled his name.

They talked for another few minutes about inane things; the ghost she and Dipper exorcised, the guy who literally checked out every book on plants that the library had who coincidentally reeked of Yggdrasil, the three hour debate with Dipper on whether road trips or blipping were better…

“Are you still planning on returning Thursday right?” he asked, finishing the last of his tea with a satisfied sigh.

“Yup! Gotta be there for the kiddos’ last day of school! Oh god, Henry…they’re half way done with high school.”

He felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. It wasn’t a good or bad feeling, it just was.

“God…wow,” he lamely replied.

“Don’t worry honey,” his wife consoled him. “When I get home we’ll both have a good freak out about how old we are over some Mabel Juice and dinosaur shaped cookies, sound good?

Henry smiled. “Yeah.”

Silence for a minute, then Mabel asked “Is Willow still acting…upset?”

He listened to make sure he heard three pairs of feet moving upstairs. “Yeah, yeah she is. I think whatever is wrong with her the kids are in on it too, or at least know but-“

Mabel sighed. “Yeah, I know.”

Henry rubbed his eyes. “I just don’t know what to do Mabes. She’s hurting, but we can’t get her to tell us anything and I don’t want to force it but….”

“Okay, I know we usually wait until June before we start taking the kids on their trips but I’m sure I can come up with a good reason for me and Willow to go to Portland next week rather than next month.”

He hadn’t thought about that. Every summer, Mabel or Henry took each triplet out on an overnight somewhere, so that each of their children got some one on one time with each parent. “I want them to know we love them, each of them, as people and not a unit,” Mabel had said when they were first thinking of the idea, and Henry agreed. Over this summer, Mabel was taking each of the kids to Portland, and Henry to Pine Mountains Observatory.

“You think she’ll actually tell you what’s wrong?” he asked. He had complete faith in Mabel’s ability to get anyone to tell her anything…but he also knew how stubborn his youngest was.

“Maybe so, maybe no,” Mabel admitted, “I’ll see what I can do.”

In the background he could hear sudden thumps, and Dipper’s voice, blurred and full of reverb.

“Dipper did you get one of everything from the machine? BRO-hey Henry, I gotta go and take care of this little dork problem.”

“I love you Mabel.”

“Love you too Henry.”

\------

Saturday dawned bright and clear as Henry Pines made his way through the kitchen and living room, to get to the front yard and fetch the Gravity Falls Gossiper. He hoped this day would go better than the last one. Willow and Acacia’s English teacher had had a heart attack and passed away in her classroom while the school was out watching the eclipse. Willow herself came home with an upset stomach and had spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in her room. Hank and Acacia didn’t look like they were feeling much better, and had joined her after dinner. Dipper had gotten a particularly bad summon with the eclipse, and when he wasn’t hiding and moping, both he and Stan had spent the evening looking like there were sticks up their butts for some reason.

There was something wrong with Willow, had been something wrong for the past semester, and Henry was determined to, if not find out, at least do _something_ for his daughter. He hated feeling so powerless to help his little girl.

He sighed as he opened the back door. At least it was summer now, and the kids would be home and helping in the Library. Even if he couldn’t help he _knew_ Mabel would eventually figure it out. She always did.

Henry stepped onto the grass and the world went black around him.

\---

When he woke up, every muscle was sore. He looked blearily around from his vantage point on the ground. He was in a forest, but it wasn’t the one that surrounded the Shack. Even leaving the fact that he knew those woods like the back of his hands this all seemed….oddly fake. The trees smelt and looked real enough, but they were spaced evenly apart, set in perfect rows upon rows. And from what he could see of the tree tops, they were all of a uniform height as well.

He felt a weight on his neck and touched a finger to it.

It was a leather collar.

In the distance he could hear the baying of hounds.

And the rapid clack and boom of gunfire.

He had no idea what the fuck was going on, but now seemed like a good time to run.

Henry struggled to get up, and set off in a sprint.


	3. Chapter 3

From his vantage point, Sebastian watched the redheaded man struggle to his feet and start off in a mad sprint.

Good.

His clients liked it when they ran.

Sebastian leaned back in his leather office chair, and looked at the multitude of screens displayed before him. From his eagle like vantage point in the Lodge, he could survey every square foot of the pocket dimension that the Hunt took place in. Every tree, every stone, had a camera, as well as the wildlife that had been brought in for some semblance of ambiance.

He wasn’t worried about someone picking off the deer or raccoons or birds and subsequently harming the cameras implanted in their skulls.

The hunters here had bigger game they were going after.

Sebastian reached for a clipboard, then kicked his feet up onto the dash that controlled the monitors as he looked through the documents before him.

This promised to be one of the best hunts he had assembled, both in terms of hunters and hunted. There were several executives from Nike and Harry and David, several judges, Congressmen from both the state and national level, the provost of Eastern Oregon University, a few other local noteworthies, and assorted friends, family, and hangers-on.

All were brought in with the promise that they could let loose, finally feel the thrill of shooting something that could talk and reason and _beg._ They had paid through the nose for it of course. The costs to maintain this pocket dimension alone were astronomical, let alone scouting fees and the money involved in acquisitions. But they had paid, and he had delivered; a banshee who couldn’t scream, several runaway witches he had lured in with the promise of a safe haven, some of the tamer species of fairies and pixies, a kappa…. Hell, he had even found a mermaid, and even though Sebastian knew the whole “eat a mermaid’s flesh and gain immortality” thing was complete bunk, his clients didn’t. Not that he had _promised_ anything but neither had he discouraged those thoughts.

He looked at the agenda attached to the clipboard as well. According to everyone’s skill level, things should go according to the time table he had allotted for this hunt. Time passed differently in here than it did outside in the regular world; a week here would be a mere Saturday back in reality, perfect for the hunter on a tight schedule.

Sebastian leaned back a little further in his chair and closed his eyes in contentment.

Everything was going to go just fine.

\----

Mabel distantly felt Henry leave the bed, but he had been getting up before her for the entirety of their marriage, so she quickly fell back asleep. Like every other Saturday, he had probably gone to get the paper, and when she woke up for good, he would be sitting up next to her in bed finishing the last of it, and drinking some coffee.

But it wasn’t the smell of coffee and newsprint, and the rustling sounds of the turning pages that woke Mabel up this morning.

“Mom…Mom…Mommy, _please_ -“

The sound of her daughter’s voice cracking and filled with tears made Mabel shoot straight to wakefulness.

She pulled Willow into a hug as best as she could from her position, checking her over for any wounds. “Honey, what’s wrong, are you okay?

Willow sniffed and wiped her streaming eyes with her sleeves. A small part of Mabel wondered at that; Will did cry but it usually took a while for her to do so. It was almost like there was something else on her mind.

Mabel focused on the here and now, stroking Willow’s wavy hair. “Deep breath Willow bean, come on, breathe, there’s my girl…”

Willow sniffed, and her chest and back shuddered as she caught her breath.

“Okay?”

Her youngest nodded. “Y…yes.”

Mabel grabbed a hair tie from her bed stand and tied her hair back. She had a feeling she was about to have to leap into action of some kind.

“What happened?” she asked again, thinking about where her bat was, how much food was in the house if she needed to go out and the kids and Stan needed to feed themselves….

“I…I thought I heard something out back so I went out to check and I stepped on the back step and…and…” Willow started to cry again.

“Mom, I felt… _something_. Like surprise, and I…I can’t find Dad and his truck is still here and I think someone took D-“

Dipper blipped into the room, face sheet white, fire sparking from his tips, and his pupils blown so wide that the black was almost gone from his eyes.

“Mabel, I can’t find Henry. He’s….he’s gone.”

\----

Henry ran, thanking his lucky stars that if he was going to be running for his life for the foreseeable future, he had at least pulled on a pair of sweatpants and an old promotional shirt he had gotten from one of his work functions before he left the house.

His bare feet pounded the earth and his legs stretched as he ran as fast as he could from the sound of gunshots. Henry’s mind was racing, trying to figure out what was going on. From what he had seen so far, he didn’t think this was a natural forest. Everything was laid out too neat, too evenly, too perfect. Maybe once he needed to take a break he could think things out a little more….

But he wasn’t tired at all.

His mind derailed. While he wasn’t in bad shape, Henry wasn’t going to flatter himself. He was in his forties and didn’t go out of his way to exercise every day like Mabel did. The wood cutting, car repair, and triplet chasing he did kept him active enough but it wasn’t like he ran five miles a day like his wife did.

So why wasn’t he tired? Not only not tired but he felt…invigorated, like he could run all day if he wanted and not even get winded.

For that matter, his feet should have been torn to shreds now, but they weren’t even hurting. It felt like they were made of leather

(felt like the time that he had hefted an axe and his feet had grounded him, linked him to earth-)

Henry rocketed to a halt.

Oh no. _Oh no._

There was a bush by one of the trees, a glaring irregularity in this overly ordered landscape and one that would draw others’ attention like it had for him but a minute or two should be fine. He ducked behind it, crouching in the space between bush and tree. Thankfully, it was tall enough to hide even his lanky body.

Henry ground his hands into his eyes and tried to calm down. He wasn’t sure where he was or what was going on (other than it was bad obviously) but the one thing he _did_ know was that sooner or later Dipper and Mabel would find him. All he needed to do was hold on and survive until then. He would manage just fine without any extra...things, thank you very much. He couldn’t afford to lose control here. His life depended on him keeping it together, not losing himself and becoming…becoming..

Absently, he felt the racing of his heart. That was something else he had noticed since the day he had saved Willow; his heart beat abnormally fast now. It didn’t matter if he was doing something strenuous or if he was vegging on the couch, his heart just pumped blood as fast as it possibly could through his body. Pumping as fast as possible to fuel _something_ , though the doctor’s had no idea what that could be.

Henry knew. He just tried his best to ignore it.

He had a sudden sick feeling that he wasn’t going to be able to ignore it for much longer here.

There was another shot in the distance and for a second he stayed frozen. He didn’t want this, didn’t want to _change_ -

But more than that, he wanted to live, so he got to his feet and took off again.


	4. Chapter 4

“What do you mean.” Mabel asked, slow and calm, “that you can’t find him?”

His eyes were still blown and his wings were shivering and close to his back. Mabel wished he would calm down because he obviously wasn’t shielding as well as he usually did; she could see Willow’s breath start to catch in her chest and her face begin to pale.

“Will, go wake up your Grunkle and Hank and Acacia, and let them know what happened, okay?”

“But-“

“Just do it honey.”

Willow saw the look on her mother’s face, and went out of the room. Mabel sighed. That really wasn’t the best course of action probably, but Dipper had been about to tip Willow into an asthma attack or worse and that was the last thing she needed right now.

Mabel got out of bed, her night gown dropping to her knees as she did so. She reached up and grabbed her brother by the shoulders.

“Dipper. Tell me. What. You mean.”

Her hands tightened on every word and as she did so, some of the black returned to his eyes, and his wings relaxes slightly.

“Mabel I-“

“Is-“ She screwed her eyes shut and took a deep breath. “Is Henry dead?”

Dipper shook his head violently. “No! No…That I know for sure. He’s still alive, I promise.”

She exhaled. “Okay. Okay good.” Mabel took another deep breath, calming and centering herself. Now was not the time to freak out or cry. Now was the time to collect information, get her bat, and when they were ready, hunt down whoever or whatever had taken her husband.

Her twin went on. “I can sense his presence on the porch, and then it’s just…gone. And I don’t feel his soul anywhere on this plane. It’s almost like….”

“Yes?”

“Like he’s on another plane of existence.”

“Can you find him?”

Dipper’s hand moved to the back of his head. “Um-“

“ _Dipper Pines can you find him?”_

He blushed. “No. Not yet anyway. Whoever has him-“ A growl entered his voice. “-h̡a҉s̶ ̧hi̕m̸ w̸e̕ll̷ hidd͘e̶n f̛r̶o͢m̢ ̀my sig͜h̴t͘.̛”

“Can you find him though?”

“Yes…yes I think so. But I’m going to need to concentrate. And it may take a while,” he warned.

Mabel nodded.

The siblings stood in silence, and then Dipper took Mabel into his arms and gave her a big squeeze. A tear slid down her face and dripped onto her front.

“We’re going to find him Mabes, I promise. And when we do, we’ll also find who took him-“

A nasty grin split his face in two, showing two rows of serrated teeth.

“W̸̱͎̪̫͓ȩ͖̙̗̰ ̝̥͞w҉i͠l̢̙̺͕͕l̗̱̬̬͘ ̥̥̮͙̞m̰̭ḁk̡e̬̲ ̫t͔̞h̘̻̭̣̀em̮͎̳̻̻͚ ̦̥̤p̜͞a̻̹̬̞ͅy̤͈͉͟.̯̭̖͖̞̻͟ͅ ̸”

\---

The mind remembered the damndest things when it was under mass amounts of stress.

Case in point, even as Henry fled from the encroaching sound of gunshots (and the bays of hounds because _of course_ ) his mind started to wander and he remembered a conversation from a few months ago…

“Can you fi- no, that’s a terrible word, forget I said that. Can you help him Dipdops?”

Henry froze, one foot still slightly raised. He had just woke up from taking a nap and had been making his way to the living room and heard-

“I…um…”

He heard a slight thump and even though it felt like the bottom had dropped out of his stomach he still couldn’t help but smile at the sound of his wife stamping her foot out of frustration.

“Dipper Pines, don’t you not tell me, even if it’s bad.”

A rustle of cloth as Dipper folded his arms, a defense mechanism against Mabel that Henry didn’t think his brother realized that he did every time his twin got after him.

“No,” he replied, and Henry felt every one of his muscles tense up.

“No?” Mabel asked softly.

“I…I didn’t mean for this to happen Mabel. But everything was happening so fast, and Willow…Mabel, Willow almost _died_ -“

Dipper’s voice broke, and Henry felt the crown of his head grow heavier just thinking about that day all over again.

“-she almost died, and I was so scared, and I _may_ have…overreacted.”

There was silence, and Henry didn’t even need to see anything to know that Mabel was staring at her brother in shock.

“You _overreacted?_ ”

“I, I just-I was so scared, and I thought it would…I thought it would dissipate.”

There was a woosh sound of dust and air being displaced as Mabel plopped onto the sofa. There was a softer woosh as Dipper joined her.

“It was supposed to go away?” she asked softly.

“Yeah it was, but…” Dipper blew out, breath leaving him in a giant sigh. “He took all of that into himself, made it part of him, part of his _soul_. He shouldn’t have been able to do that, that should have killed him but it didn’t.”

Henry felt his knees grow shaky, and as quietly as he could, reached an arm out to brace himself out on the wall.

A odd scratchy sound that was probably Dipper rubbing his hands on his face (or cockroaches; they needed to check on that soon.)

“Mabel, Henry is…he’s….I don’t know what he is any more-“

“My husband,” Mabel said firmly. “The father of my children. Your brother. Someone we love.”

Henry moved slightly to the side so that he could see the couch, but they couldn’t see him. There were tears streaking down Mabel’s face, and Dipper’s as well, and his heart clenched to see that.

Mabel reached over and grabbed a handkerchief from one of Dipper’s jacket pockets, and blew her nose with a blort.

“Ugh, Dipper we hecked up. Henry should have been in the room for this.”

“I’ll talk with him,” Dipper said, and patted his sister’s shoulder. His head turned slightly and Henry started as he realized Dipper was looking straight at him. He swallowed and nodded very slightly at Dipper, who did so in return. His mind raced. So he was…stuck like this. Permanently. He screwed his eyes shut and breathed in, breathed out. Okay, it was okay. He could put up with this, ignore this, and it would be fine. As long as his family was safe, he would put up with anything, do an-

Henry’s trip down memory lane was rudely interrupted when he ran straight into what felt like a steel wall and blacked out.

\---

Henry woke up.

Considering the circumstances, he was grateful to do so. He didn’t hear shots or baying, so it was perhaps safe to assume that he was safe for a minute or two at least.

He pushed himself up and looked at what he ran in to.

There was nothing there, just a continuation of the oddly spaced trees. He put a hand out and immediately hit….something. It wasn’t a mirror since he didn’t see his reflection but there was definitely some kind of barrier there. Henry tapped his knuckles against it. There was not the clank of metal or really any kind of sound at all.

He leaned his back against the odd barrier, legs stretched out, and looked at the forest around him.

Okay think.

This was obviously an artificial forest of some kind; nothing in nature grew in such evenly spaced intervals, trees weren’t all exactly the same height. He looked up at the sky and saw…grey. Not the grey of a cloudy day, but a sheet of grey. It seemed to be giving off as much light as the late afternoon sun, and he remembered it being lighter outside when he first woke up in wherever the hell this place was.

So, artificial landscape, artificial light, a barrier, no cover…

Why was this all so naggingly familiar to him?

He looked down and saw vines beginning to rise out of the ground, tiny thin tendrils entwined lovingly around his fingers. He resisted the urge to growl, and instead gently pried his fingers loose.

Standing up, he put one hand against the barrier.

He was in an enclosure of some kind. Time to see what the limits were, if any. He began to run again, and tried his best to ignore how he wasn’t getting tired.

Or the increasing feeling that he was drawing strength from the earth as he ran.

This was just running. Nothing more, nothing less. Something that he certainly didn’t do a lot of in Gravity Falls and as such could safely be ignored once he left…wherever this was.

He eventually hit another wall, though this time he was expecting it and didn’t brain himself running into it. Henry found a rock on the ground, and placed it near the corner. He kept running, and hit another wall, and then another, until he returned to the rock. By this time he had hit his limits, and was panting and covered in sweat. Time for a break.

He sat down again, noting absently that it had gotten darker out, and picked up the rock in his hand, rolling it back and forth between his hands. He was in a massive square, though unfortunately since he had no way of really telling time, or had ever timed himself running (and never planned on doing so), he wasn’t sure how long each wall was. Still, a square.

A square with fake light and fake plants and suddenly he remembered why this sounded familiar. A newspaper article from a month or two that had stuck with him for some odd reason. It was in the library’s copy of the New York Times, in their Fashion and Style section, and it had been about pocket dimensions. They were ruinously expensive of course, but the reporter had trumpeted that they were “the next wave in total privacy and luxury!”

So. He was in some kind of pocket dimension. Considering the size, it was built either by the world’s richest person, or with multiple people pooling their resources.

He had been fleeing gunshots and hounds since he had gotten here. There were multiple gunshots, and he didn’t think it was just one person shooting their gun off for shits and giggles so that must mean there was more than one person with a gun here. Henry reached up to the leather collar around his neck, and tried to put a finger between collar and skin. It tightened threateningly, and Henry quickly pulled his finger free. The collar loosened, and he tried to ignore the wave of anger that had rolled through him at that intrusion, anger that was his own but not quite.

Two and two added up in his mind, and Henry put his hands on his face and resisted the urge to groan.

Why hunt elephants or lions in this brave new world when one could hunt more exciting game? There had been stories about underground hunting clubs, clubs that sought out and killed supernatural beings. After all, it wasn’t like they were killing _people_ was it?

Henry ran his hands through his hair. And somehow, he had gotten mixed up in this.

He looked at his hands, and belatedly realized that even though it was now the equivalent of night in this realm….he could still see like it was as clear as day.

He screwed his eyes shut, trying to will the night vision he didn’t want away-he was in control, he could handle this-but there was another gun shot, worringly close to him. The decision had been taken out of his hands.

Henry scrambled to his feet, tried to ignore that ten minutes of sitting on the ground made him feel completely invigorated, and swore as he used his night sight to start running again.


	5. Chapter 5

“You’re being a silly potato.”

Henry sighed. He was currently in an inflatable hot tub. His wife floated next to him, big and round with their children inside of her. Overhead, a flying dolphin with four arms and mouths in his hands shot out rainbows from all of his mouths. The Shack was behind them, but it was flickering between black and white and color, and was almost floating in the air, lit within by a bright blue light.

“Mabel, I know I’m dreaming and that none of this is real.”

“Yup you are. Still doesn’t change the fact that you’re being a silly potato.”

He took a drink from a glass that looked like it was full of Mabel Juice but tasted like chocolate milk.

“How so?” he asked as he used his free hand to hold the hand of Mabel’s that had drifted onto his thigh.

Mabel puffed out her cheeks and spoke like she had a stick up her butt. “Oh I’m Henry, and if I don’t watch it I’m going to be as angsty as my demon brother doot doot doot.” To complete this she then made a series of fart noises.

Dream Mabel was scarily close to what Real Life Mabel was like. Henry blushed.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he managed to say, and Mabel laughed in his face.

“Yes you do,” she said and squeezed his hand.

A hand that suddenly was covered in bark.

Henry jumped and tore his hand away, scooting back from Mabel.

He looked and his hand was normal again.

“What...what?”

Mabel arched an eyebrow at him. “You _know_ what.”

Henry crossed his arms and looked down. There were bark patterns on his skin, rivulets of wood under the surface. He decided not to give Mabel the satisfaction of a reaction, and instead looked back up into her eyes instead.  

They were pitch black now, and he ended up jumping any way.

“Mabes?”

She laid both hands on her stomach, cradling the life within. Something in her eyes commanded him, kept him from looking away.

“You have two choices. You can stop being a goof and let go. Or you can die.”

“Let go of what?”

Mabel only smiled and pushed down on the toilet plunger, draining the hot tub of water.

\----

Henry shot up, panting. The forest was alit with what passed for early morning light. His back ached from the rocks that had littered the floor and dug into his back. He ran a hand over his face and up into his hair. His stomach rumbled, and he tried his best to put that out of mind. Considering the artificial nature of the landscape around him, there probably weren’t any berries or apples or other wild plants forthcoming.

He looked at his hands, his arms, his feet.

No bark or bark like patterns at all.

Good. That was that then and his dream was just that, a dream.

Henry didn’t hear the sound of gunfire or hounds. Considering how early it was, relatively speaking, perhaps it was safe to assume that the people with the rifles and dogs were asleep.

That was for the best, because he was going to take advantage of that time to find a way to escape from this odd place he found himself in. While Henry had no doubt that Mabel and Dipper would find him eventually, one of the few aphorisms from his mother that he still held to was that “God helps those who helps themselves.”

Whoever the people were who were rich enough to afford a pocket dimension, Henry was as sure as hell that they wouldn’t be roughing it in tents. That meant that there had to be some kind of building for them, a hunting lodge for lack of a better term.

He _could_ probably run and cover every square mile of this dimension in a day, run and run with no effort, fall to all fours to run faster, and no, no.

He was in control, and he would just climb a tree to find out. They were all of the same height, true, but they were still tall, and theoretically, he should be able to see out over the entire dimension.

Henry looked up at the nearest tree next to him. There were no branches near enough to the ground for him to grab on to-the closest one had to be at least eighteen or so feet in the air. If he had a belt on him, he could have used that to scale the trunk, but somehow Henry didn’t think the drawstring in his sweatpants would hold up to his weight. Maybe if he ran and jumped he’d at least get a few feet off the ground and a good head start?

He took a few steps back, and then ran at the tree, leaping at the last second.

His hands clasped around the bottom branch of the tree, and Henry almost let go out of shock and horror. He wanted to let go out, but instead his traitorous hands and arms hauled him up onto the branch.

From the first branch, the second, third, and fourth branches weren’t so far away.

“Goddamnit,” he swore, and then he began to haul himself up the tree.

What he saw when he finally finished ascending took his breath away like a punch to the gut.

He knew from his run last night that they were in a confined space, but as he had no frame of reference for time or miles, he hadn't known how big.

Judging from what he could see at the top of this tree, this places was utterly massive, miles and miles and miles of tree and earth all around him. In the distance Henry made out a break in the tree line where a small river or creek split the ground, spilling into a lake. What he wasn't seeing was a dwelling or even a spill of smoke if they were outside camping.

Henry happened to look up and couldn't help but groan. Really, he shouldn't have been surprised considering the amount of money it would take to create a pocket plane this size, but a hunting lodge that was anchored in the "roof" was really taking this to the next level of ostentatious and conspicuous consumption. The lodge was a ridiculous cross between the under cabin of a blimp, and a log cabin mansion.

And yet despite how goofy the entire thing was, it struck Henry with fear. There were no visible doors, and while there were windows, that would do sweet fuck all considering there was a four to five story gap between him at the top of the trees and the underside of the lodge.  And even if he was....willing to consider the idea of jumping up there, which he absolutely wasn't,  Henry thought even his new abilities probably had a limit. The inhabitants of the lodge probably had some kind of radio or collar that would grant them access to the lodge-finding one of them and taking that from them was one possibility of escape. Considering that they had guns, however, that would be a plan of last resort

("What are bullets to a being that isn't flesh?" a voice inside of him whispered but that voice wasn't getting a vote or say in this decision so he ignored it.)

Then Henry remembered that he was a pale, redheaded man, and as such was probably sticking out like a sore thumb amongst the sea of trees and quickly shimmied down back to the ground. He dropped the last few feet down to the earth and tried not to notice the giant wave of relief that went through his body as his feet touched soil.

He leaned against the trunk of the tree and blew out a breath as he tried to figure out what to do next. Part of him wanted to run back to one of the walls and see if there was a way to break out through there. He could get a rock (you have an axe, use that), and pound at the wall (last week Stan had asked in a strangled voice if those bookshelves were heavy, a wall of magic should be no problem) and-

Henry shook his head clear of the idea.

He had no idea what was on the other side of that wall after all. That article he had read hadn’t exactly been forthcoming on the finer technical details, and he had no reason to research such things until today. For all he knew, he could break through and fall back out in Gravity Falls…or a completely different part of the world or the Void.

No, a better course of action would be to find that creek, if only because it was a miracle that he hadn’t passed out from dehydration yet. It looked relatively close to him and he was pretty sure that he was facing the direction that the water had been. He could even smell water, now that he was thinking about it.

Henry started to walk in the direction of the smell, breaking into a run soon afterwards without thinking.

 ------

When they had turned twelve, Grunkle Stan and their Dad had spent a weekend splitting the attic into three rooms, and for a cow, Uncle Dipper had done something to each new room that made it the size of the original attic but without adding any actual space to the house. It made new people’s heads hurt to think about it, but it was worth it for each of them to have both their own room and have it be larger than a postage stamp.

Willow’s room was the one with the window, and it was there that all three of them had retreated too, piled on her bed and under the blankets like a pile of puppies.

“What are we going to do?” Acacia asked, her hands absently braiding Willow’s hair.

Hank sighed. “Nothing.”

Acacia snorted. “That’s bullshit.”

“It’s not. We don’t know where Dad is, _Uncle Dipper_ doesn’t know where Dad is. All we can do for now is just wait.”

Willow said nothing, just buried her face in her pillow. Her siblings noticed, but said nothing for now.

“We _can_ do something,” Acacia decided.

“What?”

In her hair, Willow could feel her sister’s hands start to take out the braid she had just done, and start anew.

“We can convince Mom and Uncle Dipper to take us with them when they go find Dad!”

As Hank and Acacia began to bicker, a tear dripped off of Willow’s face and soaked into her pillow.

She kept reminding herself that this wasn’t her fault, that there was no conceivable way that she could have foreseen this or caused this.

But all she could think about was going down for some water ten minutes ago and walking past the living room. There was Grunkle Stan, pacing back and forth. There was Uncle Dipper, curled up on the floor, muttering to himself, the carpet beginning to ooze black tar where he lay.

And Mom, on the couch, staring into the distance, hands white knuckle tight around her bat.

It wasn’t her fault but it sure felt like it was.


	6. Chapter 6

It had not been a good day.

And not just because he was trapped in a hell dimension with people out to literally hunt him down.

No, he was beginning to lose himself.

It was hard to exactly pin down what made him realize that.

Maybe it was when he realized that he had spaced out while he was running and found himself when he came back to down on all fours, galloping. He had rocketed to a stop when that had happened and then went head over heels, adding insult to injury.

Or realizing that he had smelled water that morning, but it had easily taken him several hours to get to the actual water. Henry had no idea how many miles he had covered from where he woke up earlier to get to the creek, but he did know there should have been no way he could have scented the water from where he had begun..

The water bubbled delightfully at him, as if to mock him.  

And it wasn’t just his sense of smell that had sharpened, but all of them. He heard every snap and crackle of leaf and branch under his feet as loud as a gunshot. When he drank from the creek, the water in his mouth tasted sweet and clean, almost overpoweringly so. The whole world had been blurry when he first landed here, as he hadn’t had his glasses on when he got up from bed to get the paper. But now he could see everything around him crystal clear, perhaps even better than he usually did with his glasses on.

No, no perhaps. He _was_ seeing better than usual.

And then he looked into the water, and his reflection was crowned with antlers, pairs and pairs of twitching hands dangling from them….

That was when he decided that he wasn’t thirsty any more.

Henry ground his hands into his eyes and tried to calm down. But he couldn’t because all of this was new, none of this had happened to him in the past few months…

Just breathe.

Maybe if he relaxed and concentrated he’d go back to normal, or at least will the antlers back into non-existence.

“That’s some wishful thinking sweetheart.”

His head whipped around.

Mabel was standing behind him. But this wasn’t the Mabel he woke up next to every morning. Or at least, not yet.

There were more wrinkles on her face, in the crevasses of her cheeks and in the corners of her eyes, which were now covered by cats-eye glasses. She wore University of Oregon sweatpants (odd, since he had gone to Oregon State), and a sweater with a stag on it. Her hair was a little longer than it was now, completely grey, but she still wore a flower in her hair.

Her eyes were the same blue as Dipper’s fire, from rim to rim.

“You’re not real.”

She didn’t have pupils so it was hard to tell but Henry imagined that his wife was rolling her eyes at him right now. “Nope, just a hallucination. Sorry ‘bout that.”

“You’re…you’re…Mabel, you’re older,” Henry finally managed to say, wincing at how lame he sounded.

She flipped her hair and grinned. “Glad you noticed.”

Henry smiled despite himself.

“Still look as good as ever,” he replied, hands clenched behind his back tight. He couldn’t touch her, she wasn’t real, and he didn’t want the heartbreak of trying and failing….  “Maybe I’ll be as grey as you too, to match?”

Mabel snorted. “The way you’re going, this is the only time you’re going to see me old because if you don’t stop acting stupid, you’re going to die out here.”

Henry froze, then scowled.

“Dipper, is that you? I mean, I’m happy you found me, but this is really weird and-“

Mabel cut him off, laughing. She sauntered up to him, hips swaying and eyes lidded, and motioned for him to bend down.

“If I were Dipper, would I know about-“

She whispered into his ear and Henry blushed from head to toe.

Her lips were so close, and she was so close, and he could touch her, his hands started to move towards her of their own accord, but before he could do anything she danced back away.

“Hunger and adrenaline can only do so much. Sorry Henry. But!” She stomped her foot, and twirled around in a complete circle, hair swinging as she faced him once again. “To business!” Mabel pointed a finger at him.

“Stop fucking around.”

Henry started. Mabel _never_ -well, almost never-swore.

“I beg your pardon?”

Mabel smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile.

“You need to stop being scared of yourself and start kicking some ass.”

He felt his throat tighten just at the thought.

“Mabel, I can’t do that, I can’t-“

Her sweater sleeves covered her hands as she flapped them open and close like mouths. “Lose control of yourself, blah blah blah, I _know_.”

“That’s not fair,” he said quietly.

“Dying and leaving your kids and wife when you could have done something to save yourself isn’t fair!” Mabel growled out of frustration and kicked a nearby tree.

Henry felt his temper begin to slip. “Mabel, please…”

She turned to look at him again, and he noticed with a start that her sweater now had a cartoon fire on it instead of the stag. “What are you afraid of Henry? Why won’t you just accept who you are?”

His fists clenched despite himself. “It’s not that easy,” Henry murmured.

“Sure it is! Just let go, bring that axe out, and go chop some dudes up until they free you and everyone else here!”

He felt the blood drain from his face. “Everyone else?” he asked hoarsely.

Mabel put her hands on her hips. “Well, _yeah_. These guys trying to kill you; they don’t need _this_ much space for one guy and besides, you’ve been hearing gunshots. They’re firing at other people.” She laughed. “Don’t look so surprised honey. I’m you….well, the hindbrain part of you anyway. I’m only telling you things you’ve already noticed and just didn’t think too much about.”

“Oh god….I need to find them, help them-“

“And yourself too.” He glared at her and Mabel shrugged. “As your wife and a manifestation of your subconscious, I’m interested in keeping you alive.”

She stepped back towards him, her sweater now emblazoned with a cartoony axe. She stepped right in front of him, and Henry could see her chest move up and down as she breathed, every strand of hair coming out of her scalp, the mole on her hand and the scars on her arms where her sleeves moved up a bit. She was so _real_.

Mabel looked up at him with her blazing eyes.

“Unleash yourself. Let go.”

With what felt like all of his strength, Henry shook his head.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Mabel, I-“

“ _Why not?_ ”

“Because I’m scared!

“I got that already,” Mabel said in a sing-songy voice. “ _Why_ are you scared?”

He said nothing. Henry didn’t want to yell at his wife, even if this was a figment of his imagination in front of him rather than Mabel herself.

She stalked around him in a circle, her hair streaming behind her as she moved, a hungry look in her eyes.

“You can’t keep this pent up forever, you know,” she said conversationally, the axe shifting to a giant explosion on her sweater.

Henry couldn’t help but stiffen a bit, his pride taking an unexpected blow.

“Hey! I…I thought I’ve been doing pretty good for the last few months.”

Mabel laughed right in his face.

“The kids notice! Stan notices! Dipper notices! _I’ve_ noticed! The more you try and deny it, the more it comes out!” She paused in her stalking, suddenly lost in thought.

“No…it’s not just that…” Mabel mumbled. She tapped her cheek with one pink and purple polka dotted nail, thinking until it suddenly hit her. She pointed again at him. “The more you try and push it down, the faster you’re going to change Henry.”

He felt queasy.

“No-“

“Yes! Your body wants to stay alive even if your brain doesn’t seem to want to! You’re doing things here you never did at home, _why_ is that?”

Henry began to breathe in through his nose, out through his mouth. He just needed to calm down, and regain control, calm down and regain control.

Gunshots rang out in the air, and without even thinking about it, he dug his bare feet into the earth and _pulled_ , drawing strength from the ground, readying himself to run and oh god, what the _fuck_ was he doing? He pulled his feet out of the dirt and hopped around ungracefully.

Mabel laughed, and at every round of rifle fire that sounded in the forest, a bullet hole appeared on her body. Blood began to blossom on her sweater, which now had an emblem of two crossed shotguns.  He started to go towards her because maybe she wasn’t real, but this was his wife, this was _Mabel_ and he couldn’t not help her, but she stepped backwards for every step towards her that he made.

 Mabel took another round of bullets, and her eyes blazed blue fire. She looked at the puddle of blood she was standing in and tsked.

“That’s this sweater done,” she said to herself. Then she looked at Henry and pinned him down with her eyes. “The more you fight,” Mabel said calmly, coldly, “the more you’re going to change Henry John Pines.”

Then she was gone, and Henry was left alone in the clearing, shaking with adrenaline and emotion. He wanted, no, _needed_ time to think, to recover, to clear his mind and process what had just happened.

But the shots were getting closer, and so was the baying of hounds.

Cursing, Henry took off running again, darting back deep into the woods.

On the bank of the creek, in the footprints he had left, new tendrils of clover and grass began to sprout and rise from the ground.

\------

Dipper couldn’t find him.

Henry was nowhere to be found on this planet. He even had taken the plunge and checked to see if he had…had….had died and reincarnated, but there was still nothing.  

Dipper growled, rattling the Shack to its rafters, and dug his hands into the carpet, fingers dragging through cloth and wood like butter. He forced his third eye open wider, let more information pour into his mind until tears streamed down his face and the walls seemed to throb in time with his heart. It hurt, but not in the fun way, to open his perception up this much. He could feel the bigness of everything threatening to overwhelm him completely. He curled tighter into a ball and shook, but didn’t stop.

Someone, some _thing_ , had the audacity to hide Henry away from him. Henry was his brother, Mabel’s husband, his brother, the kids’ dad, Henry was his his _his._

And when he found whoever had taken Henry away from them he was going to rip them apart from shred ̴t͟o ́f̀ucking͘ s̶h̴r̶ed̢, c͏̭̯ov̢̟̥e̪̭̮̣͔ͅr ͏̤͉t̳h̭e҉ ̸̼̯̼͙ͅͅg̳͚̫r҉͙͈̲o̢̠̯̤̯̟̠̩u̻͞n̯̫͈d̷̳̲̪͓̗̭͚ ̲̠͙͇͉͉͔͠w͈͍i̵̪̪̬͉̲̝t̪͔̞h̟̙͙̟ ͍̫̯̖͚̪th̡e҉̙͈̭̠͓i̟̳̠̳͚̦̬r̺͉̦̭̩̀ b̯̙̤̮̰l̟̥͖͔͘ọ̴͙͖͉͖̖͈ _o̼̤̪ḑ ͔̜̭an͖͖̲̞̙̞͉͠d̲̤̬ ̯̲̯͙͍͉̥͟_

A stick not so gently poked him in his ribs, and Dipper snarled at the interloper who dared interrupt him, jaws opening to bite and wings spreading wide to fling himself at his enemy.

Then he realized the stick holder was Stan and the stick was actually Stan’s eight ball cane and that he really needed to calm down since there was no one in this house that could possibly be construed as an enemy and oh god he just snapped at Grunkle Stan-

Stan stood there calmly until Dipper got a hold of himself and then he poked Dipper with his cane again.

“Kid. You need to calm down.”

Dipper looked at his uncle incredulously.

“ _Calm down?_ ”

Stan rolled his eyes. “I just had to go upstairs and calm Willow down because you’ve broken her sh…her…her ‘shields.’ And your sister had to go into the bedroom because she was getting more upset looking at you.”

His stomach dropped.

“I…I….”

Stan sighed, and sat on the only part of the couch that wasn’t covered in black ichor and dark red blood.

“Look, I’m upset about Henry too. But getting so mad you take the house down around our ears isn’t going to help him either.”

Dipper sat up, arms wrapped around his legs and wings wrapped around both.

“I can’t find him Stan. I’m supposed to be able to see anything, know everything but-“Dipper let out a bitter laugh. “I can’t fucking find someone I love.” He paused as he grabbed fists full of hair. “It’s like he’s completely vanished from this plane of existence,” Dipper went on.

“Maybe he has,” Stan replied.

Dipper looked at his grunkle and raised an eyebrow. Stan snorted.

“Did you forget about the massive sci fi horror show my knucklehead brother built in the basement?”

“Oh.”

Dipper thought about it for a second more.

“ _Oh_.” He grinned, baring both rows of teeth. He snapped his fingers and the living room returned back to normal. Dipper stood up.

“Thanks Grunkle Stan. I think I know where I need to look now.”

“Good. You going to do it outside? I’m not replacing the carpet again.” However, as gruff as the old man’s words were, there was a smile on his face to match his grand-nephew’s.

Dipper blipped out into the forest, and prepared to start combing the worlds outside of this one.

He would find Henry. And when he did, he and Mabel were going to have some words with whoever had taken him.


	7. Chapter 7

It didn’t tower over the trees but it seemed like the type of being that should. If one got closer to it, (though why would someone want to get close to this monster boggled the mind), one could discern bark like patterns on the thing’s skin. Its face was bone white and it had two dark pits where eyes should have been. Branching from the crown of its head, reaching terribly towards the sky were antlers, wood and bone. They spiraled and crawled impossibly high, and from each tine hung a severed hand or foot, muscle and bone visible at the cut. More wood punched out of its back, like spikes, and blood still glistened on the tips from where they had just broke through skin and muscle. One of its arms ended not in a hand but an axe, the metal edge wickedly clean and the handle growing into/out of the flesh of the limb. Tattered clothes hung off of the monster’s frame, and its limbs were long and ungainly; not that that kept it from running faster than humanly possible.

(“You’re like…human-plus now Henry!”)

It tore mindlessly through hordes of men and a few women holding rifles, shotguns, and bows. Its axe swung and swung, and soon the ground was littered with the remnants of human beings, parts strewn everywhere and the earth drinking up the growing puddles of blood. It roared at the moon hanging low and heavy in the sky, pleased at what it had done. It didn’t stop there though, loping through the dark featureless woods to a clearing that held a ramshackle log cabin. It didn’t stop as it burst through the door and terribly familiar voices screamed in shock and fear. It didn’t stop as horribly small red heads were cleaved from necks, didn’t stop as an old grey head went sailing, didn’t stop as a woman clung to it and cried and begged and Henry raised his axe and-

Henry woke with a scream that he wasn’t quite able to keep in. His heart beat painfully fast (even faster than usual), his stomach was sour, and he was shaking from head to toe. Every time he had fallen asleep the last two…three? No it was two. Every time he had fallen asleep these last two days he had had that dream. If he thought about it (and it was hard because his head was so fuzzy) he probably hadn’t slept more than an hour? Hour and a half? Half an hour? He had only gotten cat naps really these last two days. The world around him was blurry and fuzzy, his focus narrowed down to just running and surviving.

He looked sourly at his hands and arms. At least he didn’t have to worry about eating.

Not when he woke up with vines and sprouts shooting into his skin, piercing into his vein like an IV needle, feeding him.

The first three times it had happened he had ripped them all out one by one, and then tried to pretend that that had never happened. Now, with as little sleep he was getting, Henry was simply too tired to be bothered by it. He simply waited for the plants to withdraw back into the ground before getting up. 

That dream was every reason why he couldn’t become the Woodsman…no, no, wrong words, it would only be all too easy to _become_ the Woodsman. It was why would not _let_ himself become the Woodsman. Sure he had saved Willow the first time, but his children were not here now, Dipper wasn’t here now, and he had no leash, no restriction, nothing but his own will and self-control.

He couldn’t let the Woodsman loose, because without the restraint of his family, he would be nothing more than a monster. He didn’t trust that there would be any other outcome than that.   And he would rather die than become something that would hurt others, let alone those he loved.

The hatefully familiar sound of gunshots and hounds intruded from a distance, and Henry made himself get up for yet another day of running. He wasn’t sure how many days he had been here at this point. Thanks to the lack of sleep and the odd light that pervaded the forest, his sense of time had become completely out of whack. But it didn’t matter. Henry knew that Mabel and Dipper would come to bust him out of here eventually. There was no question of that even happening. He just needed to last long enough for them to come and find him. Maybe it was irrational to think so, but the faith he had in his wife and his brother-in-law went deep to his bone.

He began to run. The trees whipped past him in a blur, all alike, all the same. It was hard to think. When he wasn’t being crushed under the increasing weight of having to be constantly vigilant and watchful against perils both external and internal, his mind was rebelling against the never-ending _sameness_ of the world around him. Every tree was the same kind and the same height and placed the exact same distance apart from every other tree around it, and there was a small bush every tenth tree, and he had calculated and seen this ten times, a hundred times, maybe even a thousand times and it was just a brown mass to him now. It was to the point that the sight of a bird or deer would make him come to a complete halt, enrapt at the sight of something _different_. (And he didn’t try to think about _why_ the birds and deer didn’t seem to shy away from him at all.)

His foot caught in something soft and yielding yet still firm, and he slammed face first into the ground.

Henry shouldn’t have been as excited for this to happen as he was but…well, it was something _new_ and at this point he wasn’t going to turn that down.

He lifted his left foot up in the air to free it from the obstacle, and then twisted around on the ground to see what he had tripped over.

It was a corpse.

The world dropped away around him, the edges of his vision going black.

It…no, _she_ was a mermaid. Her lips and the skin around her neck were blue, and her hazel eyes were wide and unseeing, covered in a white film. The scales on her tail were dull, and beginning to shrivel at the edges. Her hands and arms were scratched to hell, evidence of the fight she must have put up, the clean bullet hole in the middle of her forehead a sign of what had ended that fight. His stomach roiled as his heightened sense of smell took in the scent of what was uncomfortably close to the smell of rotting fish and pork. Her torso... Henry looked away for a second, trying to hold down the bile. Deep breath, in, out, in, out.

Henry looked again. She lie in a thick puddle of her own blood, but in this unnatural place there were no flies, no worms, no maggots dancing attendance upon her corpse. The young woman’s torso had been cut open and spread apart, the ribs exposed to the open air, yet her…her organs were gone. As were each one of her fingers, crudely hacked off, leaving only stumps of exposed bone and muscle. His traitor mind couldn’t help but remind him of the old wives’ tale about eating mermaid flesh to obtain immortality.

And splayed around her head like a halo was curly bright red hair like Acacia, like Hank, like Willow-

Fury burned white hot through him. They (who was this they? Did it matter now?) had taken this young woman out of her home, away from her family, and brought her here to die. They had ravaged her body in death, looted her remains, and left her on the ground like a piece of trash. The fire inside of him burned brighter and hotter, and the woman on the ground grew further and further away from him, as he twisted up like a sprouting tree. She looked like she was only a year or two older than his children and absently he noticed that his antlers had come back onto this plane, solid and weighted with hands that dangled like fruit. His anger burned and it felt like his skin was splitting apart (probably because it was), wood blossoming on the surface. It was excruciatingly painful, but he only fed that pain back into the fire within him, adding more fuel to the flame.

The blood drained from his face entirely, blood vessels constricting as fluid no longer ran within them. His scalp felt warm, as if the fire within him was seconds from bursting out onto the surface. In his mind’s eye he could see his axe that sat on the porch. His right hand itched, and Henry knew if he called it would come, regardless of any barriers in its way. He could call and it would fit in his hand, the wood would kiss his hand and crawl up his arm, curl around his shoulders as he raised his blade high and-

And-

And what was he doing?

“No…no…I can’t, I can’t do this-“The words spilled from his mouth without Henry meaning them to. Panic rose hot from his stomach up into his throat, tightening it almost to a close. He had lost control, had almost lost who he was and it had been so _easy_ , he hadn’t even noticed at all.

He fell backwards on to the ground, away from the body of the young woman, curled as tight into a ball as a man of his height could. His hands went to his antlers and pulled, as if to yank them out, break them off his head, just get rid of them he didn’t _care_. He pulled his legs and arms in as tight as he could into his body, trying to will them back down to their regular length, trying to burn away the bark that had sprouted all over his skin. Every muscle was locked with tension, and he felt himself shake so hard that he felt like he was about to fall apart. Henry felt vines crawl out of the ground and entwine themselves around him, as if to offer him comfort. But it only served to remind him further of the monster he had become, a monster that he couldn’t even keep locked away.

The pain that ripped through his body was welcome, a sign that the changes were reversing, that he was going back to normal, regaining control. Henry clung to the pain, a reminder of what happened when he let his emotions get the best of him. Control. He needed to maintain control. The Woodsman wouldn’t help, wouldn’t bring that young woman back to life. What would bring her some semblance of justice would be to hold on until he could be rescued, until Dipper and Mabel came, until the authorities came and this was all taken care of and everything went back to normal, and he could keep on pretending that he was fine….

In between gasps of air, Henry made out black patent shoes coming closer and closer to his face. He took a deep breath, gulped down some rspit, and steeled himself to look up.

Mabel stood there, her appearance flickering from the Mabel he knew now, the Mabel that was eight months pregnant with their children, the older Mabel he saw earlier, and a Mabel he had only ever seen in pictures from before the Transcendence, from the first summer that she had spent in Gravity Falls. It probably should have made him dizzy or…or something, he didn’t know, Henry had more important things to worry about right now.

“M…Mabel,” Henry managed to force through his lips. “You…you shouldn’t see this.” He wasn’t sure if he meant himself, the woman lying next to him on the ground, or both.

Mabel closed her eyes, and a tear of blood fell out of her left eye, and streaked down her ever changing face. She opened her eyes, and they were flashing every color of the rainbow from rim to rim.

“You goober,” she said sadly. “I’m a hallucination, a figment of your imagination because you haven’t actually eaten people food or got a good nights’ sleep in ten days your time.”

Henry did a quick body check. Okay, the Woodsman was all gone, or gone enough, he was in the clear. With that, he let himself emerge from his huddle, and prop himself up on one elbow to look better at his wife.

“That doesn’t matter,” he said, a smile blooming on his face despite it all. “You’re my wife, and you shouldn’t have to see this.”

Mabel pulled the collar of her sweatshirt (emblazoned with a brain wrapped in a blanket with a bucket next to it) over her head for a minute. He could see the tips of her ears turning bright red; it wasn’t often he got one over Mabel. “I’ve seen worse,” Mabel muttered from within the fabric. Henry sighed. He knew it was the truth.

She pulled her shirt back down over her head, and her young/old/middle face said, “It’d hurt less if you didn’t fight it so much.”

“You know why I fight it. Why I _need_ to.”

Mabel pouted and stomped her foot. “I know the _why_ but not the _need_. You’re being an…an idiot Henry! Why don’t you trust yourself to do the right thing? You’re a good man, I know it, and you should too goofus.”

Henry said nothing. He should put up a fight, argue with her (with himself), but he couldn’t find it within himself to do so. It was like a cold drink of water on a hot day simply to see his wife, see the woman he loved more than anything else in the world.

“You need to trust yourself more, you won’t hurt those that don’t ne-“She noticed him looking at her and her face softened, saddened.

“Henry, I’m not real, you know that right?” she asked softly. He nodded, tear streaking down his cheeks as he did so.

“I do but... I don’t care. I have to see you. I _need_ you.”

His fists clenched in the dirt. “I can’t do this without you Mabel.”

Mabel walked up until she was tantalizingly close to him, knelt down to the ground. She reached out a shaking hand that was old/young/both, and pulled it away at the last minute. Her face scrunched tight in frustration. “I can’t touch you,” she said, her hands fisted at her sides, the emblem on her sweater now a large flaming fist. Bloody tears streaked down her ever shifting face, and she looked like she wanted to hit something.

Henry took a deep breath in, a deep breath out, focusing only on her and quelling the Woodsman.

“That’s okay. Just…can you talk to me? Please? About anything, I don’t care.”

Mabel nodded.

“I can do that.”

They stayed that way until they heard guns again. Mabel melted back into the forest (into his mind) and Henry got up, pulling strength from the Earth to prepare himself to run again.

As he took off, he didn’t notice the bark patterns that remained on his skin.

And if he looked back, he would have seen the vines that quickly covered the mermaid, and took her softly and gently down into the earth, leaving only flowers in their wake. 


	8. Chapter 8

Willow lay on the ground.

Around her were tall blades of grey grass, shading from the color of Gompers’ horns to the light grey of an overcast day. All around her black and white butterflies flew around, occasionally landing on her fingers, her nose, her stomach. The air was sweet, heavy with the scent of flowers, and she took a deep breath in, out, in and out again. She was alone, no intrusions, no other feelings or thoughts invading her consciousness, and it was  _glorious._

She had tried to tell Acacia and Hank about her this place before, about the field she dreamt about five times out of seven. They hadn’t seen the appeal-dreaming about the same place over and over again? And nothing cool happened?  _Boring._

They knew what she saw-or Saw-every day, what she felt, but at the end of the day they couldn’t fully understand what it was like to spend each day bombarded with the feelings of others. And that was okay, honestly, it was! There were things that her siblings experienced, problems they went through that she couldn’t understand either, and that was alright.

But it did mean they would never understand why this place was paradise to her.

One of the butterflies landed on her cheek and she giggled as its feet kissed her face. Willow took a deep breath in, let a big breath out. Here the absolute awfulness of this week melted away.

Here she was safe.

There was a rumble in the ground and the air was split with the sound of tearing metal. In her bones Willow could sense something large looming on the horizon, as if reality was being torn asunder. The few rocks that surrounded her shook and then shuddered into the air. Willow found herself floating as well, only a few inches, but they felt like miles to her.

She knew what was coming. Knew it from the few stories Mom and Uncle Dipper had shared, knew it from dares and peeks into the part of the basement they weren’t supposed to go.

Knew it as well as she knew herself.

The world around her began to flash, the sky and earth disappearing into a colorful whirl. Every color of the rainbow flashed around her, in a procession too fast to track with the human eye. She was floating freely now, and had no idea which way was up and which was down. Her stomach roiled with distress, and she screwed her eyes shut in an attempt to shut out the cacophony of light and color around her.

It was no use-the light penetrated even the black behind her eyes, assaulting her senses, making it hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to do anything at all but curl into a small ball and focus on waking up. Willow felt more light pour into her, and she knew like she did the back of her hand that soon every remnant of her self would be sandblasted away, removed by the light. Felt the light pour in and her mind begin to expand more than any human brain should. Thick liquid streaked down her cheeks and she knew without being able to see her face that it was blood.

With the last of her strength, Willow managed to gasp out, “Uncle Dipper-”

There was a roar, and a demon tore his way into her dream. He was covered in the blood of thousands; she could see it covering his arms up to his elbows, dripping from his shoes, smeared around his mouth. If she looked too close at his wings Willow had a feeling that they would look back. He was black as the void, with only brick like lines and furious flaming eyes of gold breaking up the lack of color. Blue fire hot enough to melt flesh and glass blazed from him. The air around them became hard to breathe, heavy with his presence and power.

He was awful and terrible and death incarnate. He was love and warmth and lessons sweetly taught and gave the best hugs. He was her uncle and no matter what he did, Willow knew he would always save her, help her, love her.

In the blink of an eye Uncle Dipper was next to her. He pulled her into a hug and wrapped wings as dark as the night around her, finally blocking the cascade of light and color from her senses. She could sense anger coming from outside of them, the fury of a predator deprived of its prey. There was a hiss, and Willow knew without looking that it was Uncle Dipper, bearing his fangs and letting his power beat on the air in response to such a paltry challenge.

He squeezed her tighter, and she did the same to him glad to be-

Willow shot upright in her bed, panting heavily. Awake, thank god she was awake. Uncle Dipper was there next to her, floating cross-legged in the air, and without thinking she launched herself up at him, scrambling onto his lap.

—

Dipper ground the palms of his hands into his eyes and tried to hold on to the shards of his patience. He didn’t want a repeat of yesterday, but the whole “oh what about other dimensions” thing was a lot fucking easier said than done. Honestly, Dipper should have known better. There were a hundred million billion other dimensions…more than that, an infinite amount of other dimensions, each decision made by each person in each dimension splitting off into yet even more dimensions, a dizzying array of potential that made even his mind spin.

It would be absolutely fascinating if it weren’t for the fact that his brother’s life was in danger and, as he was finding out, even his omniscience had its limits.

He had gotten a nosebleed; him! Alcor the Dreambender! It was a good thing that there were more important things than his pride on the line, and, even more importantly, that no one else had been in the room when it happened.

Dipper breathed in and out through his nose, and ignored the nagging voice that asked him why he even bothered with that play acting? Breathe in, breathe out, and focused his being on his memories of Henry. The smell of old books, freshly cut wood, and, more recently, damp earth and growing things. One of the kindest, most patient souls he had ever seen, large hands, and hilariously thick glasses. The father of his niblings, his stars. The husband of his sister, his twin. His brother. His. Dipper’s.  _His._

All he got in return were the images and feelings from a hundred thousand million other Henrys. Most of them with Mabel in one form or fashion, though some were alone, and some were, Dipper boggled at the thought, with him. The triplets were there/not there/there but also joined by other siblings. The picture of Henry in his minds’ eye flickered rapidly between genders, races, and other signs of outward appearance, moving too fast for even him to track. The impression and memories he got from this moment of their lives flooded into his head. It felt like his skull was going to burst, like he would lose even his sense of self in the flood of other realities that he had invited into his mind.

Really, it was a good thing that no one was here to see this.

Suddenly, through the cacophony in his head, Dipper felt a tug on his heart. More accurately, a tug on one of the four links that helped tethered his being to this plane, a tug on one of the links between him and his niblings. Antares. Little Fighter.

Willow.

Frantically, he dropped his search and laser focused in on his youngest niece’s mind, her soul. She was having a bad dream, but not just any bad dream. No, it involved-

Anger blossomed in his chest, and spread to every inch of his being. From deep within the basement Dipper felt a smug sense of satisfaction, of hunger that would never be sated (hunger that was too much like his own for comfort), of possessing something that di͘dn'́t ͟b͞el͠on̸g ̸t̢o͠ ̧i͘t̡.

It was nothing at all to rise through the ceiling and into Willow’s room, nothing at all to enter her dream. The maelstrom of color blinded even him for a minute, and Dipper’s heart stuttered to thin that his niece had endured this for who knew how long? The portal, long dead, should  _remain_  fucking dead grasped Willow harder to it, trying to claim her as its own. Willow looked at him and her eyes were the same whirl of color from rim to rim. Her face was pale from the flood of information that was being forced into her mind, bloody tears standing out in vivid contrast.

He blipped over to his niece, and gathered her into his arms, wrapping his wings around her as well to further shield her from the storm surrounding them. The portal fought to maintain its hold on her, and Dipper hissed, baring both rows of fangs and letting his power flood out from him. What was dead, he thought bitterly, should stay dead. He gave Willow a tight hug to reassure her, even as he pushed the other entity in her dream out and back to where it resided. Its screams of fury echoed in Dipper’s head even as he woke Willow up.

He popped out of the Dreamscape, and had enough time to pull his legs up into the air where he was sitting before Willow broke out of her REM cycle. She looked at him and immediately clambered up onto his lap, taking advantage of her height to do so.

She clung to his shirt, shaking in his grasp. Dipper stroked her hair and even though he knew the answer, he still asked “Are you okay?”

—

Her uncle smelt like pine and old blood and ozone and the dryer sheets Dad used on their clothes, and Willow felt her racing heart calm slightly at the comforting, familiar smell.

“It was that dream again,” she replied, not a direct answer, but one Uncle Dipper would understand.

He leaned his head on top of hers. “I’m sorry Little Fighter.”

Willow sighed and snuggled into his grasp a little more.

“Do you…do you have a headache? Or anything like that?” her uncle asked.

“Mmm no not really. I feel like…” She thought for a second, reaching for words. “Like a tube of toothpaste that someone squeezed really hard. Or like I got put into a giant pocket and jingled around with a bunch of change.”

She felt her uncle stiffen up at her last words.

“Uncle Dipper?”

—

There was a part of his mind that was constantly on, constantly gathering in information, absorbing and processing it.

His omniscience.

Of course, he had a hard time actively  _accessing_  that information; that way usually ended with what had happened yesterday, or worse. But he still knew things, still had things pop into his mind without consciously reaching for it.

Doors opening and revealing an answer to his problem.

A giant pocket. Pocket dimensions. Why hadn’t he thought of that earlier? There was honestly nothing else (save yourself, a small voice reminded him) that could actually rip Henry to a complete alternate dimension.

But a pocket dimension, a little piece of this reality that was folded up on its self like folding a tablecloth into four… Yes,  _that_ was more likely.

He needed to start working smarter, not harder. He needed not to look blindly at everything around him. Start with pocket dimensions. Start with ones that were actually  _near_  Gravity Falls and go outwards from there. And then he could-

A poke in his shoulder. Dipper started and looked down at his niece, still in his arms, albeit barely. (And when had she gotten big and tall enough to spill out and over from his lap?)

“You’ve thought of something; your colors changed. Does…” She swallowed. “Does it have to do with Dad?”

Dipper smiled.

—–

Henry was becoming worried about Mabel.

Over the last few rise and falls of the sun and moon, she had grown more and more ragged looking, more worn. She was shifting faster and faster between ages, going from round and glowing with life, to how he knew her now, to an older woman and back through the cycle again multiple times in an hour. Her clothes were becoming more tattered and increasingly dirtier. The images on her sweaters changed as fast as she did, but the sweater material itself remained littered with bullet holes and blood. The bags under her eyes were growing darker and deeper, and her hair was increasingly tangled and matted. Her legs, her hands, her face were covered in cuts and bruises, and her once white socks were now varying shades of brown. One of her shoes were gone, along with two of her fingernails.

(He had a feeling that his head should hurt at how fast his wife was changing appearances)

And yet she was worried about  _him_ and he wasn’t quite sure why. He wasn’t hungry any more, or tired. Hell, he wasn’t even scared. He didn’t feel much of anything at all, which was for the best really.

“Henry, please you need to rest, please lay down you…you…you big doofus dunderhead,” she would plead while he took a break (not sitting, the vines didn’t want to let him get up when he sat down.) “You’re swaying like a tr-like a thing that sways a lot. You haven’t slept in thirty…no, forty, no um-“ She had poofed out of existence then, as if trying to calculate the passage of time was too much for her.

Another time he had been watching the path ahead, pausing a moment to make sure that he was running away from the guns rather than into them.

“Your eyes glow now,” she had said, appearing next to him just out of the corner of his eyes.

“Hmm?”

Mabel sighed heavily, her sweater showing an exasperated raccoon on it. “Your eyes. They glow like a cats now. In the dark. Like Gompers?”

Henry shrugged. He had known he had been able to see in the dark since the first day he had come here.

“And that doesn’t worry you? That your  _eyes_  have changed?”

“Should it?”

Mabel had literally yanked out a chunk of brown/grey/brown hair and blipped away again.

She had appeared to him again seconds/days/hours/minutes later, stepping from behind a tree to stand in front of him. He skidded to a halt, and stood to his full height, his hands rough and bleeding from the running he had been doing (but not bleeding too much; they had been toughening up.)

He didn’t want to touch her. No. That was a lie. Every inch of his skin wanted to reach out and touch her, but even now he knew if he did, his hands would go through Mabel, would cause her to dissipate into thin air.

She looked at him, hands on her hips, and her legs akimbo, and he ached with how beautiful she was, how much he loved her.

“Shall I tell you how fucked up you are? Since you seem to be incapable of telling that yourself?”

“Mabel, you never cuss,” he couldn’t help but say almost simplistically.

She sighed. “I’m not Mabel, no matter how much you want me to be. And you are missing the point.”

He reached towards her despite himself, despite the fact that he  _knew_  better, and she danced away, still nimble despite the multiple injuries littered across her body.

“Mabes-“ and he tried to keep that in, but her name escaped his mouth anyway. A pained look crossed her face, and she closed her eyes, and visibly steeled herself before speaking to him again.

“You’re tearing yourself apart Henry.” She ran her fingers through her hair, for once unadorned with a headband or hair tie or flower crown. “You…you should be one or the other. Henry. Or the Woodsman. Not this inbetween.”

He felt completely dumbfounded at that. “Mabel, what on earth are you talking about?”

She stomped her foot and the image on her sweater turned into an exasperated looking panda wearing a fanny pack, paws on its hips. “I’m talking about you being a stupid stubborn falafel!”

“Falafel?”

“Don’t you interrupt me mister! You’re tearing yourself apart, fighting this.”

Henry held his hands out placatingly. “I’m okay, I promise. Honestly!”

“No! No you are not!” The panda switched to fire, hot and blazing and actual literal fire on her sweater.

She took a step closer to him. “Your eyes glow in the dark now.”

Another step closer. “You run on all fours, like an animal.”

Yet another step closer, and her hair was tangling even before his eyes, a tear ripping up her skirt, a cut opening on her leg. Power beat on the air around her, and he wasn’t sure if he was looking at his wife or someone else, something fey, something Other.

Mabel poked a finger as close to his chest as she was able to.

“What about last night when you fell asleep against that tree and it tried to swallow you up? You have bleeding sores all over you because the plants keep trying to heal you and you keep ripping them out. Look at your skin Henry-“

“Mabel-“

“ _Look at it.”_

Henry couldn’t resist that tone in her voice, but still his eyes brushed over the bark patterns that lay under the surface of his skin, the aforementioned wounds, the greyish brown and leaf-like mottled color of his flesh. If he concentrated, he could almost feel a spark of fear, of terror within him. It quickly went away again, covered back in the greyness that seemed to envelop his mind.

He looked back at Mabel and shrugged. His wife let out a frustrated scream that started at her toes and increased into a roar as it traveled the length of her body.

“Your antlers are showing! And they’re growing gnarly and twisty and  _bad-_ bad like not healthy, not like  _bad_ bad. Henry, your eyes are…I can’t see those beautiful brown eyes any more, they’re all black.”

She began to pace back and forth, and his eyes tracked her movement.

“You saw a deer yesterday Henry, and you froze still for thirty minutes looking at him! You’ve grown three or four inches and your senses have heightened to the point that you can hear leaves fall from the trees at night! You scent at the air before you go a different direction and when you stay still for too long you blend in perfectly into the other trees around you. Doesn’t that  _alarm_ you?”

He shook his head and the fire burning on her front died out, showing a new emblem on her sweater of a mushroom cloud.

“Henry. You are literally. Tearing yourself.  _Apart!_ The more your mind fights, the more your body changes. You aren’t meant to be in this in between state. All of this-“ she waved her hands and arms around for emphasis. “All of this is your body reacting to the fact that you won’t let yourself be who,  _what_  you need to be.”

He shook his head.

“No Mabel. The Woodsman is the last thing I need now.”

“It’s  _exactly_  what you need but you won’t see it so your body is overcompensating! Henry you need to-“ A bloody tear dropped out of one eye and it tore at his heart to see it. He felt his antlers twinge at the thought of her hurting and that was what broke through his haze. If he was at the point where he could actually feel his antlers then that meant he was past the brink of losing control and no,  _no-_ He fisted his hands through his hair, yanking on the clumps within his grasp, and breathed in, out, in, out.

“Henry that’s-that’s not what I meant! That’s not what I wanted you to do!”

“What do you want me to do then? Scream?”

“Yes.”

“Become a beast?”

“ _Yes._ ”

“Lose my self-control?”

Mabel jumped up, grabbed onto his antlers (how? For more than one reason how-) and pulled his head down to her level.

“Yes! Yes for the love of God! How many times do I have to tell you? How many times are you going to tell yourself Henry?”

“But…but you’re telling me this.”

“Henry I  _am_ you! And as the one part of your mind that hasn’t gone cray-cray banana nuts, I’m here to tell you that if you keep holding yourself back, if you keep keeping the Woodsman at bay, you are going to die. Your body and your mind are fighting each other, and if it keeps up, you will, I repeat, die. You will die here in this stupid place because you are too stubborn and you think you’re a bad person and, and-“

Her voice cracked. “You  _aren’t_  Henry. You’re a good man. You’re kind and wonderful and the father of my children and why… Why can’t you trust yourself?”

A tear slipped down her cheek, leaving a bloody trail as it slipped down her face, and Henry gently wiped it away with a finger that he pretended wasn’t as twig like as it seemed to be.

“I know who I am Mabel. And that’s why I can’t do what you want me to,” he said gently.

His wife looked at him in complete disbelief and shock for a minute. Then the shock turned quickly to anger.

“Fine. Fine! Be that way!” Mabel yelled, sounding uncomfortably like Acacia in one of her moods. His wife, the love of his life, turned on her heel and stomped away from him, storming into the woods, eventually disappearing from his view.

Henry watched her go.

Then he turned and began to run again.


	9. Chapter 9

Normally her dreams were vivid neons and day-glo explosions, flying walruses and three headed pigeons and twenty foot puppies running around, all amidst a background of plants more dense and wild than any rainforest on Earth. Normally there was a kingdom to save, cute boys and girls to look at, motorcycles to ride, massive fireworks to shoot off, and anything else her imagination could think to throw at her.

Tonight there was none of that. Tonight in her dreams she wandered a strange forest, an unnatural one; Mabel knew there was no way that trees grew in uniform distances apart from one another. The sky was an indistinct grey above her, pale light filtering through the trees. Occasionally she thought she spotted out of the corner of her eye a flash of red hair, an antler that was more wood than bone, a freckled foot. She would try to reach out, to call out to the flashes but it was as if she was invisible.

Then she was alone again.

Well, she had her bat with her at least. But she would obviously much rather have Henry at her side than a lump of wood (that also had glass, barbed wire, and ten different spells attached to it but still.)

She sat down at the base of a tree, and hugged her knees to her chest. All she could do now was wait to wake up. Mabel leaned her head against the trunk of the tree, her hair tangling in the bark. For the first time since…since the Transcendence, she felt completely and utterly useless. Sadly, this wasn’t the first time that someone dared to take one of her family away from her, and she had a sick feeling that it wouldn’t be the last. Yet even when the kids had been kidnapped, or Dipper bound, or Stan thrown into county jail (that was more his fault than any external force, to be fair,) Mabel was able to do _something_. Even if it was calling to ask that Dipper stay home after what had happened to Willow last year and guard her family, it was still something that Mabel had been able to do in the situation.

She leaned back against the trunk of the tree. This time, there was absolutely nothing that she could do but wait, and it burned like acid etching into her soul.

There was a sound, a feeling that could only be described as ‘plib’, and Dipper sat down next to her. He looked exhausted, face pale and drawn, bags under his eyes (well, bigger than usual bags), and hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. But the dark grin he was giving her was all triumph.

“I found him Mabes.”

\------

His screams echoed through the trees, and the tiny part of him that was still capable of rational thought warned him that his screams would attract the guns, attract the men wielding said guns.

But Henry didn’t care because below him laid a pile of pixies, their bodies peppered with the buckshot that had killed them, and their heads and wings crudely torn from their corpses.

He screamed with rage at the loss of life that lay before him, felt his blood crying to avenge them, to correct the injustice done to them. Only he could right this wrong, and all he needed to do was call his axe to his hand, to light his soul on fire and-

He screamed to lock that beast away because if he let it out, then he would become a monster, become no better than those who had killed the men and women (boys and girls _Christ_ ) that lay in a pile below him. Screamed at the pain that wracked his body as he forced it to obey his will, to settle down, to turn away and concentrate on returning back to normal.

Henry began to stumble away from the scene, his stomach roiling, even as his ears let him know that the hunters were coming, were two miles out but getting closer, his nose could smell their excitement. Every step was a stumble as his feet kept getting sucked into the earth, roots trying to attach to the soles of his feet.

He needed to get away. He needed to keep running. If he kept running, he’d keep surviving. If he kept running, he wouldn’t have to think. If he kept running, he could just focus on his feet pounding the earth, the exertion of his muscles, and absolutely nothing else happening to his body.

If he kept running he’d be able to outrun himself.

“That’s right. Run boy. Run like a little sissy.”

Henry came to a complete halt, his feet quickly anchored to the ground as roots climbed up and over them, whispering to him to let them love him, feed him, help him rest.

Not here.

Not now.

“Didn’t expect any better from you though.”

There was a rustle of leaves behind him as the owner of the voice came closer. And he was trapped, rooted to the spot both literally and figuratively.

Henry steeled himself as the speaker came into his field of vision. He was shorter than Henry; but considering that that was only by three inches, and the man was even burlier than his Uncle Dan, that didn’t really mean much. His overalls were stained with dirt and blood and tree sap, and the flannel shirt he wore underneath was misbuttoned and covered in moth holes and cigarette burns. His beard was as flaming red as his hair and went down to his chest, and eyes the same color blue as Acacia’s looked at him with distaste.

Henry sighed. “Dad. What are you doing here?”

Arnold pulled a cigarette out of the bib of his overalls, and lit it with one index finger. He came closer to Henry and blew the cigarette smoke in Henry’s face, like he had a thousand times before when Henry was a kid.

“Thought I’d come see you die.” His eyes raked Henry up and down. “You don’t got much longer you know? Your bark is flaking off and you’re leaking chlorophyll.”

A tiny part of Henry’s mind was pealing alarm bells at him; his dad rarely used words more than two syllables long, but the majority of him was focused on what he heard.

“Bark? What are you talking about?”

Arnold blew another puff of smoke in his face, making his eyes water. “ _Look_ at yourself boy.”

“I-“

“ _LOOK_.”

Sense memory at that tone of voice made Henry’s head jerk down.

His skin was still the mottled grey-brown wood color and patterns that he had been doing his best to ignore. But there were parts that were peeling away, cuts that he didn’t remember getting turning into long peels of bark that hardened into wood as it tore from his skin. Blood, thick and more green than red, oozed in their wake.

“No,” Henry whispered to himself. “No…this…this can’t-“

A hand, strong and large and callused, gripped one of Henry’s arms, squeezing tight and sending pain shooting up his arm.

“Don’t be even more weak than you already are boy. You can’t ignore this. You’re dying.”

With a growl, Henry ripped his arm away from his father, who only smirked at him.

“Finally you’re showing a bit of backbone. Not that it really makes any difference now.” He finished his cigarette and flicked the butt at Henry’s face, like he had done a thousand times before. He began to pace around Henry, making sure that he lingered where Henry couldn’t twist to see him.

“It makes me sick to see how you’ve wasted the strength I’ve given you, that others gave you.” Fresh smoke from behind him as his dad lit yet another cigarette.

“I didn’t want it, didn’t ask for it,” Henry replied quietly, hands fisting and bunching at his sides.

“Tough shit. You have it and you are _wasting_ it.” He had completed another circle around Henry and now stood right next to Henry, smoke wafting up into his face as his dad leaned in close.

“You could do whatever you wanted, you know? Use that axe of yours for more than just hands and feet? Use those hands and arms to pull and tear? You can do it, you know that. You can feel it in your muscles, your bones. Can’t you?”

Henry said nothing, could barely hear his father over the roar of blood rushing in his ears, the churning of his stomach as the truth of Arnold’s words rushed over him. It was easy, so easy at home to pretend that everything was fine, that his new found strength was something benign but it wasn’t, never would, never could-

His dad laughed in his face and pointed down. “You’re tied to the earth now. Even now it’s feeding you, lending you its strength. When you call it will come.” He paused for a minute. “That idiot at your house has no idea what he’s made you into.”

“So you came here to tell me I’m dying,” Henry retorted, pulling on his age, on having been free from this man for over twenty years, to lend strength to his words. “Thanks. Can you leave me here to keep on dying in peace then?”

“And miss this show? Not a chance! I haven’t seen something this pathetic since you couldn’t kill that deer when we went hunting.”

Henry closed his eyes at that memory, of his dad forcing him down to the ground, shoving a knife into his hand, and making him slit the deer’s throat, his father’s hand grinding his wrist bones together, leaving a bruise that lasted a week.

His dad looked at the pile of small corpses on the ground near them. “That’s your fault right there.”

He opened his mouth to deny it, to fight back, but no sound came out.

His father grunted and spat out of the corner of his mouth, the glob landing square on Henry’s feet with the ease of long practice. “You could’ve stopped this before it even got started if you had manned up and gone hunting yourself.” His dad’s face began to lose some of its characteristic ruddiness, red slowly draining into white. “But no, you were too pussy, too scared. And now you’re running like a baby and there’s no one here left alive but you and those other guys.” He snorted even as his irises started to shift from blue to brown to black, the whites of his eyes becoming shot with blood, more and more veins breaking and flooding the sclera with black ichor. “Those assholes are completely shit shots, and you’re still running scared from them like a chicken.”

The older man had taken a few steps back while he was looking at the bodies, but he began to move closer towards Henry again.

One step, and the blood had completely drained from his face, leaving him sheet (corpse) white.

“You’re weak.”

Another step, and his dad’s hair and beard had begun to take on a bluish hue.

“You’re pathetic.”

Henry couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak, his mouth and throat were bone dry and his heart was racing as his dad took another step closer to him and antlers began to spiral out of the other man’s head.

“You’re worthless. You’re trash. You are an utter disappointment for a son and I should have drowned you in the pond out back when you were born.”

Henry was trying his best to let the other man’s words wash over him like he had a thousand times before, trying to reach for the inner calm, the control that would keep him from exposing weakness (from water leaving his eyes, from the cry leaving his throat as hand hit flesh) but it wasn’t there.

It was gone.

Everything was gone. This place had beaten him down, stripped away every last one of his illusions. He didn’t remember when he last slept. He didn’t really know how long he had been in this twilight forest. He felt hollowed out. Empty. Nothing.

His father continued ranting at him but Henry tuned him out with the ease of long practice; he had learned long ago to tell when the tone went from ‘rant’ to ‘belt.’ It was odd to be looking at a mirror of himself; Henry knew there was a monster inside of him, but it was one thing to know that and another to actually see that monster manifest. He hadn’t exactly had a mirror handy when he had gone to save Willow or during this whole ordeal.

Did he really look like that? Henry knew he got taller, remembered the burn of muscles twisting and tearing into new shapes, but his dad was standing over even him now. The antlers on his father’s head twisted around each other, the tines turning to wicked sharp points. Veins bulged from the other man’s arms, and suddenly blood coated his dad’s front, his dad’s face. His dad’s teeth even, which really didn’t seem right, Henry didn’t ever remember any biting. Same with the massive wings, of an indeterminate species, muscle glistening and exposed to the air, and blood flicking the ground as his father beat them once, twice. But those oddities didn’t matter since this was what happened, would happen to Henry if he let himself go like Dad was.

His father stopped yelling and glared at him, eyes burning blood red with hate. He held up a hand, the knuckles gnarled and fingers tipped with jagged dirty claws, and stepped towards Henry, the hand clenching down into a fist. Henry took a step back involuntarily (and a small part of him wondered why the plants and earth let him go.) Every bone that had gotten cracked or broken under that hand (all seven of them) ached in memory, every spot on his skin that had borne a bruise thanks to that hand throbbing as well.

Arnold paused, looked at his hand, then looked down at his son. He closed his eyes, and sighed, before lowering his fist. Slowly, gently, he lowered himself down, kneeling so that he and Henry were at eye level. Every alarm in Henry’s head was blaring at him. Dad...his father just didn’t _do_ stuff like this. What the hell was going on?

His father looked down at himself before burying his face into his hands. “I… oh my god. Henry. Is this how you really see me? Like a monster? Christ son, I’m…I’m so sorry, I-“

Something broke and snapped in Henry’s mind.

“No.”

“No?”

Henry sighed himself this time, but he was empty, still empty, so there was no fear in him, nothing left in him but a weary resignation. Maybe this would have been an excellent time to yell all the things he ever wanted to scream at his father, to have a grand cathartic moment, but Henry was simply too tired.

“You are not my father. You are… I’m not sure what you are, but you’re sure as hell not Arnold Corduroy because Arnold Corduroy would never apologize to me. I cut Dad out of my life a long time ago and I don’t regret it. So if you would please kindly fuck off to wherever the hell you came from, I’d appreciate it.”

Henry rubbed his hands over his eyes and when he uncovered them his father was gone as well. All of the energy rushed out of him and he slumped down to the ground. He rested his head on his arms as best he could. Why would he hallucinate his dad, why would his mind want to punish him like that? He wasn’t his dad, he tried to be nothing like his dad, even if his mind borrowed the Woodsman, cloaked Arnold in the Woodsman’s clothes…

A niggling idea bubble popped and burst in his head. Was that…

Was that how he _really_ saw himself?

If there was one thing Henry knew, it was that he was nothing like his father. Well, he was tall like Dad and had Dad’s red hair and hawk nose, but in the ways that mattered, the ways that counted, he was nothing like his dad at all. He knew that if only because of a wasted childhood of him trying to force Henry to be like him.

Another bubble and he thought of Willow. When he…when he was the Woodsman, he had still felt in control of himself. He was still rational. He stopped when he needed to stop. Why did he ever think that it would be otherwise? This power he held wasn’t good or bad, it just was. It was what he did with it that was what mattered. There was a capability for great violence in Henry but that was anyone really. He just happened to have a little extra oomph that was all. He wasn’t comfortable calling himself a good man, but he could give himself that he was better than who he came from.

He was a dad. A husband. A brother. A librarian. An excellent chef.

He wasn’t a monster. And he was….

Henry face palmed.

He had taken a really bad situation and just made it a lot worse for himself completely unnecessarily.

Despite everything, despite the fact that he was swaying on his feet, that he was hungry and tired and he _hurt_ , Henry started to laugh a tiny bit.

“I’ve been a goof ball,” he muttered to himself, looking at the ground.

“That’s what I was trying to tell you dumbo,” Mabel’s voice echoed in his head, exasperated but also amused. As her voice began to fade, she got out “Glad you _finally_ got it. Now get crackalacking, and get home.”

He took one step forward, then another, and another. He wouldn’t search out the hunters actively; that wasn’t him, wasn’t his way. But he wouldn’t be dodging them anymore. And he knew what he would do when he saw them.

Henry couldn’t help but smile, finally in control, really, truly in control of himself again.

He took ten steps into the trees and ran into a clump of terrified teenagers.


	10. Chapter 10

Henry froze.

The teenagers froze. There were five of them, three girls and two boys. There were dark circles under their eyes, hollow cheeks and thin wrists speaking to a hard life lived even before being snatched to this hellhole. Each of them wore multiple layers, tanks and torn t-shirts and raggedy jackets and vests over leggings and shorts and ripped jeans. And what did he look like to them? He knew the antlers were out, and he could feel five pairs of eyes looking at them, and the dark fruit that dangled from them. But other than that-he did a quick mental once over-other than some stray bits of bark, plants that still curled and uncurled lovingly around his feet and ankles, he was…normal?

“Told you soooo,” Mabel mocked, albeit gently, in his brain. It was a good thing that this version of his wife was a complete hallucination otherwise he would never have heard the end of it.

Henry held his hands up, so the kids could see that they were empty.

“H-hey,” he croaked out, voice rusty from disuse. “I’m not one of those guys with the guns out there. I’m a librarian. My name’s Henry.”

All five of them still looked like they were about to bolt, so slowly, gently, Henry lowered himself to the ground, so that he no longer towered over them. The ground cradled him as he sat, fresh green grass bursting forth around him. That…was probably not going to help put these kids (and that’s what they were; the oldest of them couldn’t have been any more than fifteen or sixteen years old) at ease.

He put his hands on his lap, still out where the kids could see them. “I was taken off my back porch. I’m not sure how long I’ve been here.” Henry looked next to him, where a raspberry bush had sprouted and was rapidly growing. “Uh, if you don’t find it too odd feel free to have some ber-“

The words had barely gotten out of his mouth before the kids swarmed him, or more accurately, the bush. Henry looked down at his right hand, fingers curled in the dirt and vines twining around his fingers like snakes, kissing his skin with their touch. Before he would have been horrified, been terrified of whatever power in him brought fruit from seemingly nothing. But there were kids, terribly thin and eyes who had seen too much even before being brought to this sick place. Maybe… _maybe…_ He closed his eyes dug his fingers in a little more and tried to think about other kinds of fruit: blueberries, strawberries, blackberries. Henry didn’t realize how much he had been concentrating until a shy hand tapped on his arm.

“Hey, um, dude? Henry?” It was the oldest girl, hair a defiantly large afro in contrast to the rest of her bedraggled appearance. “You, you can stop now. Don’t want to attract any attention.”

He opened his eyes. Only the knowledge that he was responsible for the small group now, that he didn’t want to scare them away, kept him from swearing like a sailor.

The earth around them had broken into a riot of green. The orderly trees were still there, but new, blessedly irregular branches sprouted from them willy-nilly. Smaller trees-apple trees?- had begun to grow in between the gaps, breaking up the neat, even lines of trees. The ground around them roiled with vines and ivy, fruit bushes and flowers. The smell of damp earth, of growing things, of _life_ in this grey prison hung heavy on the air.

Henry looked back to the small group to find five pairs of wide eyes looking at him. Well, four wide pairs and one pair, the oldest girl, the one who obviously was their leader, looking at him measuringly. Finally she nodded and pointed to herself.

“I’m Shamsara. The kid in the construction vest is Milo.” Milo, the youngest of the group who was indeed wearing a vibrant orange vest, waved at Henry before wandering to the nearest apple tree to grab one of the rapidly ripening apples. Shamsara pointed at the other two girls. “That’s Lia and Martine; they’re sisters. Lia is the one with the braids.” Martine, whose own hair had been roughly chopped off at some point, was covered in blueberry juice. “And I’m John,” a quiet voice said from behind him. Henry turned to see another young man, hair in dreads and a look in his eyes like Willow had whenever the auras began to overwhelm her

And come to think about it, he hadn’t actually _seen_ Milo pluck an apple from the tree (and it was a good fifteen feet tall already.) Martine and Lia hadn’t spoken a word aloud but he could tell from the looks they were giving each other that there was _some_ kind of conversation going on between them and there was a tingle of something in the air around Shamsara and-

Shamsara cocked an eyebrow at him.

“You figure it out?”

Henry smiled, trying his best to appear disarming. “It’s not every day I’m privileged to meet five talented young witches.”

“Glad you seem to think that,” Milo muttered, pieces of apple spraying out of his mouth. Henry’s stomach sank.

“It’s like that, is it?” he asked gently.

“We’ve been on our own for a while,” John said, fingers weaving patterns that only he could see in the air. “We found each other, made ourselves whole from the cracks of our lives.”

Shamsara sighed, but fondly. “John’s our poet. But yeah, tldr we had shitty homes and shitty parents and we all left or got kicked out. Same old, same old. We were doing little jobs here and there in Minneapolis, and then one day we ran into this dude, Sebastian. Like, who the fuck names their kid _Sebastian_ am I right? That’s such a fucking old dude name.”

Lia laughed, horsey and hoarse, and Martine followed a second later.

“See, they agree. But yeah, this dude comes in and he says he knows a place where people like us can flop for a few days, even get some help and…and…”

Shamsara blushed and looked down and muttered “andweretiredofrunning” before glaring at Henry. She sighed and went on. “But yeah, we got fucking played and now we’re here in this shit show. We’ve run across some-“She looked at Milo. “-some things. Only reason we’ve survived is because Lia and Martine can throw up a good shield and John has this weird trick he does with the deer that lets us hunt and eat them-“

“I just ask them to go to sleep and they do,” John said dreamily and Henry tried really hard not to think about how in another life, with another family, it could have been Willow standing in front of him like this.

Shamsara looked at Henry. “So what’s your deal? I mean, I’m guessing the weird antler shit you got going on is why you’re here.”

Henry couldn’t help but chuckle a bit. “Yeah, you’re about right. But trust me, this usually isn’t out in the open.” He took a deep breath, slowly standing up as he did. “Look, I know we just met, and you kids have no reason to trust me or anything I say, but I think we should stay together. We can help each other out, and I expect to be rescued soon.”

Shamsara laughed.

“By who? Santa Claus? Unicorns? Alcor the Dreambender?

“Um, actually-“

“Sham.” John’s quiet voice broke through the clearing and the other four turned to look at him. John turned towards Henry, pupils blown and face wan. “He’s telling the truth.”

“He is, is he?” She walked right up to Henry, unconsciously placing herself between Henry and the rest of the kids as she did so. She poked a finger into Henry’s torso.

“You got a plan hotshot?”

Henry shrugged. “Not really. Just stay alive until my wife and brother come.”

‘Whooooaaaa. Your old lady can break you out? That’s…that’s….” Milo waved his arms around. “That’s hella.”

Henry smiled. “It is,” he agreed.

Milo giggled and then a crack broke the air. A spot of red bloomed on Milo’s tiny shoulder, as all around them men in camouflage jackets and leather boots burst into the clearing. Most of them were armed with shotguns, though Henry also spotted several bow and arrows, two spears, an axe, and what looked like a warhammer. Milo fell to the ground, clutching his shoulder and hissing in pain. Lia and Martine quickly dropped down as well, one of them ripping off a shirt to tear into bandages, while the other began to hum tunelessly, her hands over the wound.

A voice rang out in the clearing, coming from above.

“Alright gentlemen, you found them.”

“ _Sebastian_ ,” Shamsara hissed.

“I would advise shooting your prey now,” the man’s voice continued on, dry and emotionless. “Normally I would say to let them run free, to give chase, but we’re getting close to this dimension expiring so while you have some room to play, I’d say make it quick.”

More men entered into the clearing, stomping on the flowers and trailing vines, fighting their way through the brush that had sprung up.

Shamsara looked up at Henry.

“So, you going to do something or what?” she asked, and Henry ached to hear the bravado barely covering the fear in her voice.

He took a deep breath in, let it out again.

“Do you trust me?”

(Can you trust yourself Henry Pines?)

Shamsara looked uneasy, as if she wanted to take her time to think before answering, but the sound of guns cocking and men hyping each other for the kill made her decision for her.

“Yes, yes I do goddamnit, you weird redheaded giant dude.”

(If Mabel trusts me, then maybe I should too.)

“Okay.” Another deep breath. “When I start to change, you take everyone and get as far away from here as possible.”

“Wait, hold the phone, _change?_ And how are you going to find us again? What the fuck Wile E Coyote shit is this-“

Henry tuned Shamsara out. She was a smart and brave young woman, and he trusted that she would do what he had asked of her.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Think about the fire deep inside of him, the tiny blue flame that Dipper had left behind after Caney Patch, the tiny blue flame that Henry had claimed as his own. He hadn’t realized, until now in this moment of reflection, that it was no accident that the flame was still here, the power still available for his taking. Some part of him (the part that had taken his wife’s form and walked the woods with him) had seized it, stolen it, clutched the seed to his breast.

Clutched it and let himself become engulfed by its fury, for this very moment.

He let the fire blaze up high, and overtake him. He fed it his fear, his pain, his doubts. Let the fire burn everything away.

He wasn’t fine. He wouldn’t be fine. But it was because there had ultimately been nothing wrong with him, with this at all.

Pain flared as his bones began to stretch inhumanly long, as muscle tore and ripped apart before reknitting themselves along new lines. Pain flared as his hair dissolved into ash, eaten by the blue flames bursting from his skull, as the blood boiled and steamed away from the heat within, leaving him corpse white. Pain flared as his knees bent backwards and broke into their new form, as bark bubbled up from strands of muscle to erupt and blossom through his skin. Pain flared as his eyes dissolved away, as he called his axe to his hand and the wood grew into him, puncturing into his skin and curling roots around his arm bones. Pain flared and he staggered under the weight of an explosion of growth from his antlers, from the hands and feet he had taken unfurling from the tines.

Pain flared. But Henry had weathered far worse than this.

(though, he had to admit, the massive amount of adrenaline and panic going through his system right now helped too.)

He rose from the ground, felt like a flag unfurling into the wind as he stretched into his new height. Around him he heard the raised voices of the hunters, felt tiny pings against his skin (oh, how funny, they thought their guns would actually work on him.) Some of the hunters decided to flee into the forest; he’d deal with them in a minute. They weren’t important.

Henry closed his eyes and focused.

Not as important as Shamsara and her friends.

Focus and he could sense them, sense the beat of their feet on the ground, the stirring of the air as they let out fast, shallow breaths. And it wasn’t just them he could feel, but the other mermaid, who had coated herself in mud and hid on the bottom of the river, her tail and back scraped to hell from the shallow water and fast current. It was the pixie and fairy who had survived the deaths of their family and friends, who clung to each other in the hollow of a tree.

He could sense each and every life in this forest, each and every sapling and sprout, each and every creature that stank of death and fear.  
  
Henry could tell, he realized with some wonder, that he could tell the difference between the two. Tell who was precious, who was innocent, who was considerably less innocent but still a good person all things considering. Could tell whose hands dripped with blood that only he could see, souls that drank in the screams and terror around them.

He wasn’t senseless. He wasn’t mindless. He wasn’t going to go off in an uncontrollable rage.

He was himself.

Out of the corner of his eyes he saw a flash of purple, and his wife cupping her hands around her mouth, to amplify her voice.

“KICK THEIR FUCKING ASSES!”

With a rush of power surging into his arms, his legs, Henry swung himself around and slammed the axe down on the first hunter’s leg. His blade cut through the flesh and bone, easier than a hot knife through butter. Any other time he would have staggered under the weight of the limb blooming on the tines of his antlers but he only felt alive, felt his veins fill with flame and his heart about to burst, barely able to contain the fire inside. Another hunter sunk a Bowie knife deep into his back, and if it had been Henry, he would have died. But he was the Woodsman, and he felt the bark and wood of his flesh twist and turn until the knife was swallowed into his trunk. That particular man reeked of mermaid and he could see _gills in his teeth_ -

Henry’s axe cut not at the wrist but at the shoulder, a good one-two chop.

Hunters came at him, one on one or all at once. They brandished spears and bows, guns and knives, and none of it phased him. His body was pliant, his body was bloodless, his body had transcended meat and flesh. He took hands and feet, arms and legs (but never lives, no, it was far better to let them live and _suffer_ ). There was no part of him hiding any more, no part of him trying to deny the truth.

(Part of him was currently shaped like his wife and screaming incoherent encouragement, but Mabel seemed to be having a lot of fun, so he wasn’t going to stop her.)

He had been wrong a second ago, Henry realized as his axe swung yet again. He wasn’t just himself. He was himself, and he was the Woodsman. They were two and they were one. Reflections of each other. The Woodsman wasn’t only the fire that burned, the blade that cut and devoured, hatred and killing. His other half was also the gentle fire that warmed a hearth. The blade that chopped wood for said hearth. Love and protection that was wolf fierce but not lesser for it.

He, they, had grown into someone new.

They were home, finally at home, within themselves.

There was no horror, no fury… well. No, there was, but it wasn’t directed at him, but channeled instead at the perpetrators of the crimes he had seen in the forest around him. He wasn’t becoming mad with power or lost in rage because… that wasn’t who he was. And if that wasn’t who he was, then it wasn’t who the Woodsman was either.  
  
They swung their axe as one, and his soul sang with the feeling of a job well done.

Time blurred, became meaningless. All that mattered in the here and now was protecting the saplings. All that mattered in the here and now was ensuring that vengeance was done, that judgement was meted out.

“Hey, dude, I think you got everyone.”

The Woodsman turned. Shamsara stood there, gazing placidly at him, her left hand held nonchalantly behind her back. He could hear her heart beating double, triple time. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Milo, apples and pinecones floating around his head, ready to throw and…oh. Oh dear.

He looked down at the ground.

In a circle around him lay a pile of bodies. Screaming, blood splattered and puke covered, crying and damp with piss… but alive. Alive to cradle the cauterized stumps where their limbs used to be.

Henry smiled.

Alive to face trial.

“You can go now,” he thought (to who? The Woodsman wasn’t alive, just a part of himself) and felt every change he had accumulated melt away. He fell to his knees as he was hit with what felt like a full body Charlie horse. His axe thudded to the ground next to him, and he swayed as tunnel vision hit him.

“Hey, hey you motherfucker-“ Shamsara’s voice, distant sounding. “You don’t get to do all that bloody cool shit and then fucking _die_ on us-“

The world went dark around him.

A woman’s voice, cheerful and sweet and deadly, fell into his ears as he faded from consciousness.

“Oh don’t you kids worry. My big moose wouldn’t dare die on me this easily!”

-Mabel?


	11. Chapter 11

Henry opened his eyes.

He was in a forest, but it wasn’t _that_ forest. It was his forest, the one that surrounded the Shack like an island surrounded by the sea.

It was home.

There was a body standing next to him, all wool sweater that constantly changed hues and symbols, leggings and skirts, boots and Mary Janes. The body smelt like the weird cotton candy ‘perfume’ that was more water than anything else and sold for two dollars at the drug store and had beautiful long hair that billowed in the breeze, hitting him in the face.

There was a hand in his, calloused and covered with sparkles and bits of stray paint and nail polish and a sticker of Stan’s face they had laying around the house.

He smiled.

“Mabel.”

Eyes that were swirling rainbows from rim to rim gazed deep into his. One of them winked.

“Not quite. I just came to get you out of bed. It’s time to go home.”

Henry opened his eyes.

He was in bed.

Next to him, Mabel was curled up in a ball against his side. She stirred as he woke, stretching herself out with some audible creaking sounds from her joints. She craned her head to look over her shoulder at him.

“Took you long enough.”

\--

“I’m sorry Daddy.”

Henry pulled himself out from under the truck, which had once again sprung a leak somewhere deep in its bowels. Mabel had been making noises about replacing it for the entire time they had been together but well, it had been with him since he was fifteen and he got it from his cousins scrapyard and. No. He’d make the damn truck work, darn it.

Willow stood in the doorway, but didn’t seem to be in a hurry to step out onto the porch and into the yard. Her feet were hidden amongst a puddle of denim; she must have grabbed Hank’s jeans on accident. She was wearing one of Stan’s old sweaters, the one with two Stan-faces pasted onto dogs’ bodies, chilling on a boat with the words “SEA DAWGZ” above it. Her waist length hair was loose from its usual braid and hung lankly in front of her face.

Henry fought back a smile. His daughter may have been able to read the emotions of others and Know Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, but she was also still fifteen, and easier than a book to read.

He reached over for the box of shop wipes he had on the ground next to him and pulled one out, making a futile attempt to clean his hands. “What for? Taking the last Stancake at breakfast? Between you and me Willowbean, I think you saved me from gastrointestinal distress there.”

 “ _Daaaaad_. That’s-“ 

 

Her face, a petulant teenager having to deal with a dad, quickly fell into something darker and sadder. “That’s not what I meant.”

 

“Well, why don’t you come on over and tell me? This is probably something you don’t want to yell across the lawn, yes?”

 

The corner of Willow’s mouth lifted up briefly, and she began to make her way over, only occasionally tripping over the jeans that were far too big for her. She plopped down on the grass next to the driveway. Gompers appeared out of nowhere (literally. It was his newest trick and it was driving Dipper crazy trying to figure out how the goat was doing it) and laid down next to Willow like a particularly large and stinky dog, his head in her lap. The weak smile on her face grew a tiny bit stronger, and she began to pet Gompers’ coarse fur.

“It’s my fault,” she finally said.

“That you’re getting your brother’s jeans dirty?”

“What? No!” Willow paused. “Well, yeah, but Hank won’t notice. Or care.”

Henry sighed. Having the kids do their own laundry was supposed to have fixed that problem and he _knew_ Hank washed his clothes as much as his sisters did and yet-

“It’s my fault you’re… you’re… you’re different now.”

Henry shrugged. “Your uncle is a demon Willow. Different isn’t bad.”

Willow’s fingers clutched for a second in Gompers’ fur. “No! That’s not what I meant! Stop winding me up and just listen to me! It’s my fault that you got changed! It’s my fault that you got kidnapped and bad stuff keeps happening to you and-“

She took out her inhaler, and took a few puffs. Henry leaned over to rub her back as she used her inhaler, hands tangled in her long hair.

“Hey, I didn’t mean to belittle you Willow. I’m sorry.”

She sniffed. “It’s okay Daddy.”

Henry sighed, and pulled her in for a side hug.

“Willow, none of this is your fault.” At that, his daughter snorted, a sound far too ugly and cynical for a girl her age, but he went on.

“Listen to me Willow,” and something in his voice made her look up and into his eyes for the first time that afternoon. “You cannot go through life owning other people’s actions.”

“But if it wasn’t for… for that day in the church you would have-“

He shook his head. “Nope. You didn’t ask to be kidnapped- at least, I hope not. That’s not on you. Your uncle and I could have done a dozen things differently to save you. None of our actions are on you. I made my own choices, and I did so willingly.”

“Daddy-“

“I did so of my own accord, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. I love you Willow, loved you since the first time your mom told me about you. I would do anything for you, but my love is not your obligation. I’m your dad, I’m here for you, no matter what.”

He leaned in to kiss the crown of her head.

“The only person who you are responsible for right now is you. And your life is far too wonderful and full of potential for you to take on the weight of other people’s decisions.”

Willow twisted around until her face was buried in his shirt. He felt hot tears hit his chest, and wrapped his arms around his youngest child tighter, letting her cry out the weight on her shoulders.

After a few minutes, she sniffed and looked up at him.

“I still don’t entirely believe you. About the fault thing.”

Henry nodded. “I didn’t think you would. Unfortunately for you, I’m going to keep telling it to you until you do.”

She smiled. “I think… I think I’m okay with that.”

Above and behind them, there was the sound of a window opening. They turned to see Hank popping his head out.

“Hey, have either of you all seen my jeans? They were my only clean pair I had left?”

Henry turned to Willow, and to her jeans, now coated in grass stains and bits of oil.

“You’re on your own for this one,” he said with a smile.

\--

Sebastian finished pouring out his glass of whisky, and returned the bottle to the mini bar underneath his desk. With no one around to see, he propped up his feet on the desk, loosened his tie a bit, and leaned back in his chair.

Well.

That had been a massive clusterfuck, to say the least.

He hadn’t been able to escape the aftermath. The cable news networks had been devoting 24 hour coverage to what was now being called informally ‘The Big Chop’, to say nothing of the newspapers or the local news. The vice-president of sales at Nike, some of the key board members of Harry and David, three Oregon Supreme Court justices, _both_ Senators from the state of Washington- the list went on and on (he remembered issuing the invitations, cashing the checks.) All of them were currently in hospitals throughout Portland; there had been so many of them it was necessary to spread them over the area. Sebastian had noted with a little twist in his stomach that the pictures that had been taken of the victims in their hospital rooms showed that they weren’t handcuffed down, despite facing a laundry list of charges. Perhaps, he thought, it was because every single one had been maimed, missing mostly hands and feet, though in some cases their limbs were gone up to the shoulder and hips.

Sebastian took another sip of his whisky, letting the liquor burn its way pleasantly down his throat. Yes, there was no denying that things were completely borked. His reputation had taken quite a hit. Sebastian’s job depended on him procuring animals and beings that were dangerous but not _dangerous_. Known variables rather than, according to the few reports that had leaked to the press from the rantings and ravings of the hunters, a weird ass demon deer tree thing with a murder axe. And indeed, he had lost a fair bit of business, both from having to lie low (but not as low as one would think; the contracts the hunters had signed had made it _very_ clear what would happen if they squealed) and cancellations. It was alright, he understood. Hell, he even gave his cancellees a third of their money back, and he never did refunds. But he fucked up.

The nice thing about his business though, was at the end of the day, Sebastian was one of only two or three people in the world who provided the kind of services he offered. And there were always hunters, always men (and a few women) eager for the hunt of their lives and with the money to pay for it. So he had to lay low for a few months. Wasn’t the first time it happened, wouldn’t be the last. So this last hunt ended in blood and mass dismemberment. He was already thinking of several ways to spin it to his advantage; his clients always pushed for the hunts to be as dangerous as possible, and with some promises of extra security and vetting of prey… yes this could work very well indeed.

There was a knock at the door. Sebastian took his feet of his desk, covering the spot where his heels had been resting with a manila file folder.

That must be the new partner his accounting firm had sent over. Sebastian had been a little wary at first to have a new guy coming, but apparently half the staff had been stricken by the flu, and this Mr. Rytone had come with only the highest of recommendations.

“Come in!”

A youngish man stepped into the room. He looked to be in his early forties, crow’s feet and laugh lines beginning to sprout on his face, yet his lightly curly hair was still a deep brown color. Said hair was done in a loose ponytail of all things, and in Sebastian’s opinion it was drifting dangerously into mullet territory considering the bangs hiding Mr. Rytone’s forehead. He was dressed formally… far too formally. There was a suit, but then there was the goddamned tailcoat like they were at the Governor’s Ball. But then it was paired with a loose bow rather than a proper tie?

Sebastian shook his head. Between that and the silly star shaped cufflinks, he was _really_ going to have to have a word with Rutherford on their weekly call this Friday. Sebastian ran a dirty business, but he still had _standards._

And because he had standards, he put on his most charming smile, and held his hand out.

“Sebastian Ekelhaft. Pleasure to meet you; you come highly recommended by Mr. Rutherford.”

The man’s grasp was a little too firm, and his nails oddly sharp, like he had done a poor job cutting them and left them with jagged edges.

“Tyrone Rytone. And may I say I’m excited to be working with you for the foreseeable future?” Mr. Rytone sat down without being invited, peering at Sebastian’s office, and at the (safe for public) trophies Sebastian had claimed from previous hunts.

“Yes well, as your boss has probably informed you, I would like to go over my stock portfolio first, and then which of my, ahem, _side_ businesses I can best channel that money through-“

“I’ve always been partial to laser tag palaces,” Mr. Rytone said wistfully. Sebastian just goggled at him. Was this man serious?

“I have a few ‘Chair King’ franchises that serve the purpose just fine, thank you. Now, if I may-“

“What’s that?”

Sebastian took a deep breath, and reminded himself that apparently Mr. Rytone had saved another one of the firm’s clients both two million dollars and from a seven year jail sentence before going on. “What’s what, Mr. Rytone?”

A finger jutted out by Sebastian’s face, and pointed to a spot on the wall behind him. “That weird plaque.”

Sebastian relaxed. Oh, that was it? Ah well, it was natural for people to be curious, and of course the whole point of trophies was to show them off.

“That is a mermaid scale I found in the water during my last hunt.”

“Oh.” Mr. Rytone’s face darkened slightly. “Mr. Rutherford told me about that.”

Sebastian made himself smile ruefully. “Yes well, it will serve as a reminder of what not to do again. Now, thinking about the immediate future-“

“Yes. Thinking about that. Honestly, I’m more focused on your lack of future.”

Sebastian raised an eyebrow. “I beg your pardon sir?”

Mr. Rytone grinned, baring his teeth. They looked oddly sharp- perhaps there was some preter down the line in the man’s family.

“Sebastian- can I call you that? Yes? Good. Anyway, the thing is Sebastian, you look pretty in shape, so I’m thinking you’ll give me a good run.”

“I… what?”

Mr. Rytone snapped, and while he and Sebastian remained in their chairs, the world around them had _changed_. Changed into-

It was only because he was in shock that the first words out of Sebastian’s mouth was, “This dimension should be gone by now!”

Around them were the evenly spaced and perfectly symmetrical woods of the pocket dimension he had so meticulously planned out a few months ago. Peering out from the darkness between the trees were hundreds of pairs of glowing eyes, the deer and foxes and birds that he had stocked the place with. Like all pocket dimensions of its size and scope, it only had a limited span of life, and should have collapsed in on itself by now (conveniently taking any evidence with it.)

Sebastian looked at the thing sitting across from him, and was glad for the instinct that had led him to put his pistol in the back waistband of his pants this morning.

“Mr. Rutherford has no idea who you are, does he?”

The thing calling itself ‘Mr. Rytone’ threw his head back and barked out a laugh.

“Eddie boy? Oh he knows me, he knows me _j͝ust f͜i̧ne̶._ You know, for such a hot shit lawyer and accountant, he does a terrible job of reading the fine print of a contract.” Another grin, and how could Sebastian have thought those teeth to be anything other than fangs? “He tried to enslave me, _me_ of everyone out there! Too bad for him he used Google Translate to do his Latin. And now-“

Sebastian kept his voice as calm as he could. “And now?”

“I let him stay alive in exchange for giving me a back story for times like these.” The thing- no, demon, it had to be a demon, with that talk about contracts and slaves- frowned. “Which come up really ridiculously often, and I don’t mind a bit of subterfuge but it can be **put̛ ̵you҉r h͟a̵n͟d ̡bacḱ _͡down̕_ ̛Sèb̨a͝s͟ti͜an**.̧

Sebastian’s hand, which had been gently, oh so gently, moving to draw his gun, slammed down onto his left leg with enough force that it would leave a massive hand shaped bruise in the morning.

His mouth gone bone dry, Sebastian asked, “Who are you?”

The thing stood up and shed the fragments of humanity that had clung to it. Claws and fangs lengthened, its ears became wickedly long and pointed, and ichor flooded the being’s eyes until the white was completely overcome with black, brown fading into brilliant gold. The being rolled his shoulders, wiggled his hips, and a massive pair of bat wings burst forth from his lower back.

“Oh?” the creature replied, and how could have Sebastian missed the weird tone in the being’s voice, like it was coming not from vocal chords in a throat, but escaping from the depths of a well.

“I’m…” He peered at Sebastian and sighed. “You know, I was going to do a whole bit where I quoted the Rolling Stones and it would have been really witty and fitting, but I have a feeling it’d be wasted on you. And also I’m n͜o̙̥̜̖͇̻ͅt͎͉ ̤̟̗i͏n͙̜ ̥̙̖̥̩̺ṱ̻̤͈͔̱̝h̬̹̠͢e̘ ̥̭͇̟͉m̪̥̮͠o̟o̴̬̠̲̺d̻̮̪͈.̻͙”

The man bowed.

“Alcor the Dreambender, _not_ at your service, thank you very much. But that’s not the me that is here today to talk with you.”

Sebastian’s mouth was so dry, it took him a second to force the words out of his throat. “Who, then?”

One second Alcor was four feet away from him, the next only an inch or two. The demon’s breath rolled on to his face, and Sebastian gagged at the smell of rotting meat and rancid blood.

“That was my _b̸̰̻͎͔r͕o̗͎t̪̙͈̺̟̙̞͞h͈͇̤͈̻̱ͅe̘͖̹̞r̹̺_ you brought here to break, to torture, to **_ḵ͇͝i̶̫̘̲l̰͓͇̳ḷ͖̬͉̦̥͙͘.̳̮̞͓̣̪̤_** ”

The demon grinned wickedly, and all around Sebastian, the glowing eyes in the forest seemed to multiply.

“And now, I’m going to return the favor. I hope you last awhile; there’s nothing I love better than a good _hunt_.”


End file.
